Eco on Derrida

Eco is not uncritical of Derrida, but he disagrees with Searle’s claim that “Derrida has a distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false,” insisting instead that “Derrida has a fascinating penchant for saying things that are nonobviously true, or true in a nonobvious way.”

He elaborates: “When he says that the concept of communication cannot be reduced to the idea of transport of a unified meaning, that the notion of literal meaning is problematic, that the current concept of context risks being inadequated; when he stresses, in a text, the absence of the sender, of the addressee, and of the referent and explores all the possibilities of a nonunivocal interpretability of it; when he reminds us that every sign can be cited and in so doing can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable – in these and many other cases he says things that no semiotician can disregard.”

Eco disagrees with Rorty’s claim that Derrida flouts common sense too: “I think rather that Derrida takes many of these obvious truths for granted – while frequently some of his followers do not.”