Abstract

More than fifteen years after Jacques Derrida passed away, he remains a controversial figure in philosophy. Much maligned, both when he was alive and after his death, Derrida’s relation to philosophy proper has always been an uneasy one, not least because of his relentless questioning of the notion of "philosophy proper" itself. It is this relentless interrogation of the history and presuppositions of Western philosophy that has made him an attractive figure to comparative philosophy. Many of the authors in this volume, and others beside them, have seen in Derrida a kind of thinking that refuses to play by the rules of traditional Western philosophy, while at the same time respecting those rules as well. What Derrida called the double bind is something that I believe most comparative philosophers struggle with: the need to open philosophy to its other but at the same time to guard a kind of philosophical integrity and rigor.