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The problem I have with Milne's summary of the theories of Jacques Derrida is more substantial: it's not just a matter of a few unfortunate lapses in style. I admit that it is nearly 20 years since I studied Derrida's theories, so my memory may be faulty and I'm certainly not up to date with Derrida's latest work. However my memory of reading Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, plus what was said of Derrida's theory in lectures and tutorials simply doesn't match Milne's summary.

If memory serves, Derrida makes a lot out of Western philosophy's habit of creating binary oppositions in which one term is privileged over the other: Essence and Existence, for example. This usually results in a lot of argument about which is more important: should Essence open the door for Existence, or is it the other way around? In Of Grammatology he doesn't concern himself directly with this most enduring of philosophical dualities (philosophers have been tossing it around in one form or another since the Pre-Socratics), but some more apparently ordinary ones: language and speech (or for Saussurians langue and parole) and speech and writing. He also writes a lot about supplementation and the supplement, an idea which he has a lot of complicated fun with. The text he uses as the springboard for this discussion is Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, in particular a passage where Rousseau uses the word "supplement" as a euphemism for masturbation.

You could easily get a joke out of this, to the effect that Of Grammatology is a big book about wanking, written by a French wanker, for a lot of other wankers. If that's your idea of satirical humour, you're welcome to it. It doesn't in any way detract from the main point of my quick snap-shot of Derrida's work: there's sod all about the British empirical method or class values in it. Whatever his virtues as a journalist and columnist, when it comes to Jacques Derrida, Glen Milne doesn't know Jack Shit.

There's still a lot to be said on Milne's article: it's one of those irritating pieces that is so damn wrong, you wonder where to begin and just how long to go on. However, now that the National Museum's presentation of history has been put on the culture wars agenda, along with the Windschuttle vs Reynolds et al stoush, its another subject I can come back to later. And later. And later.

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Update: the comments threads for the first two parts of this post are well worth reading.