In today’s Boston Globe, a writer takes a stab at helping us understand the legacy of French intellectual Jacques Derrida, who died a week ago: “What did I expect from Derrida himself that I couldn’t get in a course on Deconstruction and Literary Theory at an American graduate school? Somehow I wanted to become French, but more French than the French. French and other. American and other. Self and other. Deconstruction was the language of this impossible desire, as I then knew it.”

I’m not sure that makes anything clearer. Mark Molesky and I–who have never aspired to being “more French than the French”–wrote on Derrida here.