How Jacques Derrida saved civilization

In the middle of May, a French technology entrepreneur named Brivael Le Pogam published an apology. Not a personal apology but a national one, on behalf of the French people, for the offence of having produced what the Anglophone world calls French theory. The post traced a now-familiar genealogy. Le Pogam outlines how France once gave the world Descartes, Pascal, and Tocqueville; but then, in the rubble of 1968, it gave us Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. The latter trio stand accused of forging the ideological weaponry that today paralyses the West; their ideas crossed the Atlantic, married American puritanism and racial guilt, and begat wokism. Le Pogam concluded by claiming that the answer to the havoc wreaked by French theory is presently being assembled in Silicon Valley, by builders rather than commentators. Elon Musk amplified him approvingly, and within days the post had become one of those texts that circulate as a means of signalling which side of the civilisational divide one stands on. It has been viewed 55 million times on X alone. By contrast, Derrida’s most popular book, Of Grammatology, was considered wildly successful when it sold 100,000 copies.

I want to take Le Pogam’s post seriously because it says something consequential, often repeated, and I think badly misguided, about a thinker who deserves better:. Others may quarrel similarly over the legacies of Foucault and Deleuze, but the three are profoundly different thinkers, and the habit of shrink-wrapping them into a single doctrine is the first symptom of the problem I want to describe. My concern, first of all, is with the claim that Derrida taught that texts mean nothing and that “the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme.” Furthermore, I want to contest that Derrida set out to dynamite the three pillars on which, Le Pogam tells us, civilisation stands: truth, the good, and the inheritance worth transmitting.

My defence in a nutshell: Derrida, by any reasonable accounting, was one of the most careful, most systematic, and most reverent readers the Western tradition has produced. To present him as Western civilization’s enemy is to reveal not only that one has not read him (few of his virulent critics have) but that one has not read about him with any care. In a post lamenting the decline of intellectual seriousness, this is harder to excuse.

II.

Since the accusation concerns the treatment of texts, we should begin by noting that the famous slogan Le Pogam places in Derrida’s mouth, the death of the author, is not Derrida’s at all. “The Death of the Author” is the title of Roland Barthes’s famed essay of 1967, the product of a structuralist moment with which Derrida’s relations were difficult at best. Likewise, the perpetually slipping signifier comes from Jacques Lacan, drawn from a psychoanalytic system that Derrida spent considerable energy criticising. An apology for the loss of stable meaning and authorial authority cannot, it turns out, keep its own authors straight. Instead, it attributes to one man the catchphrases of two others and calls the composite a corrupter of youth.

This would be pedantic quibbling were it not diagnostic. What circulated in May was not a reading of Derrida, but a reading of a rumour of a reading, at roughly a fourth remove from anything Derrida actually wrote. Far from proclaiming the death of the author, Derrida was preoccupied to the point of obsession with authorship, with signatures, proper names, biographies, the strange ways the author’s life inscribes itself in a body of work. He wrote extensively on the signature alone. Would a thinker for whom the author was “dead” have spent decades brooding over what it means that a text is signed?

It is rather unglamorous to depict someone who spent decades inside a small canon of texts (Plato, Rousseau, Husserl, Hegel, Austin, Joyce, Celan) trying to show that their arguments depended on distinctions the texts themselves could not stably maintain. It’s much easier to portray him as the diametric opposite of a Silicon Valley builder, a Gallic nihilist who announced that texts can mean whatever you want them to, that truth is a power play, that there is nothing outside the text. There’s a real irony in the fact that a philosopher who spent decades refusing to let a text be reduced to a slogan has himself survived as a caricature.

III.

What, then, did Derrida actually do? The answer, sustained across 40 books and hundreds of essays, is that he read. His corpus is, from end to end, commentary, a genre Le Pogam treats as parasitic upon the real work of builders, but that is also the genre in which Western thought has transmitted itself since antiquity: Alexandrian scholia, patristic exegesis, Talmudic disputation, medieval glosses on Aristotle, humanist editions of corrupted manuscripts. The Western tradition, in short, is not a neat list of “Great Books” but endless arguments about reading and interpretation. Derrida belongs to that lineage, and he knew it.

Derrida’s first book was a translation of, and long introduction to, Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, a work of patient phenomenological scholarship that won the Prix Jean Cavaillès. “Plato’s Pharmacy” is a painstaking reading of the Phaedrus. In Of Grammatology, Derrida devotes hundreds of pages to Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, an obscure text that many of Rousseau’s admirers have never opened. Glas is a book-length juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet. There are sustained engagements with Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, and Austin, and, on the literary side, with Mallarmé, Joyce, Blanchot, Kafka, Celan, and Shakespeare. It is curious to accuse Derrida of destroying the Western canon when he could not write a paragraph without it.

The manner of reading matters too. Derrida was slow, exhaustive, exorbitantly attentive, closer in spirit to the Talmudic commentary of his Jewish ancestors than to demolition. He read his authors in their original languages, in their variants and their marginalia. In Of Grammatology, the very book that is supposed to have annihilated meaning, he insists on all the classical protocols of scholarship: the languages, the editions, the historical contexts. Without that scholarly labour, he writes, interpretation loses its “indispensable guardrail” and would authorise itself to say almost anything. The sentence is a rebuke delivered in advance to his lazy imitators and subsequent lazy accusers.

IV.

Derrida did not deny that truth exists and said so with a directness that ought to embarrass those who repeat the accusation. In the 1988 afterword to Limited Inc, written precisely to answer this accusation, Derrida stated that the value of truth was “never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed” within more demanding accounts of context and interpretation. He called the suggestion that deconstruction licenses any arbitrary reading a caricature.

The most-quoted sentence by Derrida, il n’y a pas de hors-texte, “there is nothing outside the text,” is also the most misquoted. It does not mean that books are all that exist, or that reference is an illusion, or that the reader may decide that a text means anything he or she pleases. It means that there is no unmediated reading, that everything must be interpreted, that (for example) when we see constitutional lawyers spending centuries debating the meaning of words and phrases in the Constitution, constantly re-reading and re-interpreting, they are doing something that is inherent to textuality itself. Derrida himself later offered the gloss that the sentence means nothing more than that there is nothing outside context. Between the claim that meaning is difficult, contested, and historically situated and the claim that meaning is entirely arbitrary lies the whole distance between scholarship and nihilism. Derrida stood on the scholarly side of that line for his entire career.

V.

Also, consider what this alleged nihilist did with his institutional efforts. In the mid-1970s, when the French state moved to curtail the teaching of philosophy in the lycées, Derrida helped found a research group to defend it on the grounds that a republic owes young people the discipline of reason. In 1983 he founded, and was the first director, of the Collège international de philosophie, created to keep philosophical work alive outside the academy. In his late lecture “The University Without Condition,” he mounted a lengthy defense of the university as the one institution committed unconditionally to the transmission of truth.

In December 1981, Derrida was arrested in Prague. He had travelled there, under the auspices of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, to conduct clandestine seminars for Czech dissidents. The secret police planted drugs in his luggage, charged him with trafficking, and released him only after the French government intervened. Surely a man who risked a Communist prison to teach Plato to dissidents has earned the right not to be called an enemy of Western civilisation by a venture capitalist on X?

The pattern holds wherever one looks: Derrida’s anti-apartheid activism, his long campaign against the death penalty, his seminars on hospitality, forgiveness, and democracy all extend the West’s moral inheritance rather than immolating it. And in “Force of Law” he wrote the three words that should have retired the nihilism charge for good: “Deconstruction is justice.” Whatever else that sentence means, it is not the sentiment of a man who believes in nothing.

VI.

Joyce is personal territory for me. I first read Ulysses at 16, during the summer before my final year of Irish secondary school, and this led subsequently to my first encounter with Derrida as an undergraduate. Derrida read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake across more than three decades and devoted two remarkable essays to them. He treated Ulysses as a vast memory machine of the West, a book in which Homer, Aquinas, Vico, Shakespeare, and many others are gathered and compressed, and he confessed that Joyce’s ghost haunted everything he wrote. He remains one of the very few philosophers to have understood Joyce from the inside.

And Joyce is precisely the test case that exposes the poverty of the indictment. Joyce did more violent things to language and the novel than Derrida ever did to philosophy. Joyce made every signifier slip; Joyce dissolved the stable narrator, the stable word, very nearly the stable letter. Yet no serious reader takes Ulysses or Finnegans Wake for an act of hatred against the West. These are some of the most learned acts of love in modern literature, books that could only have been written by someone who had absorbed the entire tradition and could not stop turning it over and over.

Derrida spent the academic year 1956 to 1957 on fellowship at Harvard, during which he spent much time reading Joyce in the Widener Library. Derrida clearly came to see in Joyce his own procedure: total fidelity to an inheritance, expressed as relentless, even violent attention to its letter. If to question is to destroy, the indictment must reach Joyce before it reaches Derrida — and behind Joyce, Socrates, who was put to death on approximately Le Pogam’s charges of corrupting the youth. As for the predecessors Le Pogam cites, Descartes began by doubting the existence of the external world and Pascal anatomised the wretchedness of man and the vanity of his institutions. The Western tradition has never been about settled answers but rather sustained, disciplined questioning.

VII.

There is a biographical thread worth mentioning, too, because it explains a sensibility. Derrida was an Algerian Jew, born in El Biar in 1930. In 1942, under Vichy statutes that had stripped Algeria’s Jews of the French citizenship the Crémieux Decree had conferred, the twelve-year-old Jackie Derrida was expelled from his lycée when the Jewish quota was tightened. He carried that expulsion for the rest of his life. His late meditation on language and identity, Monolingualism of the Other, turns on a paradox he compressed into a single sentence: “I only have one language; it is not mine.”

Derrida’s lifelong wariness about the rhetoric of purity, rootedness, and the organic community was not, in other words, an affectation of the Ivy League seminar room. He had seen as a child what a civilization serenely confident in its own identity could do to those it decided were not of it. Those of us who write about antisemitism in Europe, who have watched, in Ireland and elsewhere, how swiftly a moral consensus can harden into something that no longer needs to look at the people it condemns, might hesitate before sneering at a philosopher’s vigilance toward consensus. Derrida knew, from his own experience, what happens when the we let our guard down.

VIII.

Something happened, however, when Derrida’s texts crossed the Atlantic. François Cusset documents the migration in his 2008 history, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, the book from which Le Pogam borrows his vocabulary, and, one suspects, most of his narrative. We see ideas wrenched from their philosophical contexts, reshaped into methods, moralized and bureaucratised. The American academic habits of finding every text complicit in some crime, the substitution of suspicion and moral outrage for reading, are real: I have observed them at close range, and they deserve much of the criticism they receive. But they are an American artefact, and Derrida repeatedly registered his bemusement at what was being promoted under the name of “deconstructionism.” Blaming Derrida for modern campus “cancel culture” is absurd when Derrida himself routinely defended literature and ideas against censorship. Even Le Pogam’s own genealogy betrays the case it tries to make: Butler and Said read Foucault, and Crenshaw inherited a framework assembled largely elsewhere. Derrida figures in the indictment mostly as décor, the famous name that lends the story its air of erudition.

One further irony should be noted. The author of the apology is the co-founder of a company that manufactures AI video avatars, synthetic clones of persons. If any force in 2026 is detaching words from their authors, images from their referents, and speech from truth, it is not a shelf of patient philosophical commentary in a university library. A man whose business is the industrial production of unstable signifiers can hardly blame a French philosopher for the slippage of meaning.

IX.

I want to end somewhere less defensive and more constructive, because Le Pogam’s post raises the very problem to which Erin and I have devoted the Story Incubator Writing Lab: partisan polarisation and the narrative habits that feed it. What the neuroscience of storytelling has taught us is that polarisation thrives on compression, on the caricature, the summary of the summary, the adversary reduced to three sentences and a punchline. The polarised mind is a mind that has stopped reading: it pattern-matches, assigns the tribe, and moves on, rewarded at every step by algorithmic amplification. The viral apology for French theory is a perfect specimen of the problem, compressing three lifetimes of thought into a single paragraph, engineered for the signalling needs of an audience that will never check a claim.

The antidote, we have found in our work at the Lab, is not counter-caricature. It is the restoration of slowness through telling stories capacious enough to hold multiple truths at once, through attention patient enough to let an opposing position articulate itself before judgment. Derrida, of all people, is an ally in that work, very nearly a model for it. His practice was precisely the discipline our moment lacks. He read his adversaries at excruciating length before disagreeing with them. He refused the compressed verdict on principle. He treated the Western tradition not as a slogan to be brandished but as work to be performed. “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task,” he wrote. It is hard to think of a more conservative sentence in the philosophy of the last century, in the oldest and best sense of that word. He deconstructed only what he loved, and said so more than once. The point of the exercise was never to tear down the house we live in but to learn, joist by joist, how it had been built.

A civilisation is transmitted by those who read it. Derrida did more of that reading, and did it more carefully, than almost anyone, and he did it while founding schools, defending the teaching of philosophy to the young, and smuggling the Western canon past the secret police of actual tyranny. One man spent fifty years reading Plato, Rousseau, Husserl, and Joyce, and another man dispatched him in a tweet between funding rounds. Which was practising the fidelity to heritage? The pillars the post invokes, truth, the good, the inheritance worth transmitting, can be accessed only through the slow, scrupulous, loving attention of readers, which is also, we have come to believe at the Lab, the only way to take on polarisation. Derrida gave his life to that attention. So: no apology is owed. Instead let’s get back to reading.