Receiving Derrida’s Inheritance: The Deconstruction of Tradition

I have been asked to re-member Jacques Derrida, to put him back together after 20 years. In considering his traditional contributions to philosophy, we must remember that he bears a tenuous place with respect to tradition—that he is working with “the greatest multiplicity of inheritances”. We cannot reduce Derrida’s thought to his life, but neither can we forget that belonging to a tradition (or not) will be written into his inheritance and any legacy we might receive. And if deconstruction is to be the tag we attach to his name as a matter of remembering, we must not think about it as a trope that does the work of signalling his celebrity or some kind of resistance to convention, but must instead be disciplined by it to reconsider our own relationships with tradition. In this article I examine different understandings of tradition before thinking about its relationship with deconstruction.