So far so good. But what do you subtitle a book on Derrida in a series called “Great Thinkers”? That’s a tough one, an open invitation to pigeon-hole him in a thoroughly un-Derridean way before you even get past the book’s cover.
Here are some of the options that went back and forth between me and the publisher.
- “Jacques Derrida: Father of Deconstruction”. I don’t think so.
- “The (De)Construction of Idea(s)”. No, on so many levels.
- “Jacques Derrida: Founder of Deconstruction.” Over my dead body.
- “Jacques Derrida: Deconstructing the Transcendental”. Hardly inviting for non-philosophers.
- “Jacques Derrida: An Outsider Several Times Over”. This one is a quotation from Lesslie Hill’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. I thought it gave the wrong impression about privileging the “outside” over the “inside”, which course is not what Derrida does.
So, what did we go for? Here it is: “Jacques Derrida: Host of Deconstuction”. OK, it doesn’t work as well as “hôte de la déconstruction” would in French, but it does have the merit of wresting at least some agency from Derrida and gesturing towards deconstruction as “what happens” (to use his own description). Also, it hints at the ambiguity of Derrida’s relation to “deconstruction”. Finally, casting deconstruction as a parasite invites the idea of the necessary supplement: we could not live without the “alien” parasites in—for example—our gut.
Do you have a better idea? I’d love to hear it, and may end up asking your permission to use it (with appropriate acknowledgment, of course).