difference. What we take to be the substantial presence of a
speaker understanding a thought and communicating it as a
message to listeners is actually just as elusive and uncertain as
a scrap of writing, full of obscure expressions, by an unknown
author.
Yet Derrida does not advocate an abandonment of rea-
son. He is not a Dadaist revolutionary babbling nonsensical
verses or an absurdist performance artist rampaging on a
stage. Instead, as a philosophical skeptic, he devotes exhaustive
efforts to analyzing the very writings that are the most logo-
centric in their inclinations. When read carefully, these works,
by Hegel, Heidegger, and others, also cast intense doubt on
logocentric prejudices. Oppositions like truth versus lie or
presence versus absence are inevitable: we cannot think, talk,
or live without depending on them to structure our world. So
the trick is to rely on these oppositions, as we must, while also
keeping in mind that they are subjected to intense questioning
even in the words of their advocates, the great philosophers
(who, often, want to find a more genuine truth, or a more ab-
solute form of presence: Plato’s episteme, Heidegger’s Dasein).
Derrida’s idea is to adopt a shrewd, two-faced conscious-
ness, at once logocentric and skeptically antilogocentric. Der-
rida’s attention to the power of changing contexts to shift
meaning provides a crucial key to his work. He is, perhaps
above all, the philosopher of contingency, insisting that any-
thing can turn out to be something else if it is reinterpreted or
seen from a different perspective. For him, there are no ab-
solutes: no protection from the instability of changing cir-
cumstances and, therefore, no protection from new meanings.
This underlining of contingency is the form of his skepticism.
This skepticism requires that Derrida derive from the
fact of contingency the much more dubious notion (basic to
34 From Algeria to the École Normale