Derrida deconstructed

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE about Jacques Derrida, he was one cool looking dude. As a boy, the young Jackie (he was christened for the star of Chaplin’s The Kid, Jackie Coogan) wore a straw boater and sang along with Maurice Chevalier records. As a man, with his high cheekbones and his sly, ophidian eyes, not to mention that shock of quiffed white hair, he could have been a pop chanteur: the Sacha Distel of semiotic deconstruction.

Certainly Derrida looked good on TV — all fey irony and corduroy blouson — in those oh so serious talk shows the French still specialise in. Not that he was on TV all that much. He was too busy writing. Over the years, Derrida, who was born in Algeria in 1931 and died in 2004 in Paris, published more than 40 books. So Peter Salmon’s title, , is something of a hostage to fortune. Biographies, even biographies of idealist philosophers who doubt