My youthful enchantment with the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida began with a migraine of baffled repugnance. When his celebrated, incendiary essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ came around as that week’s reading in an undergraduate ‘Introduction to Literary Theory’ module, I found that I barely understood a word of it, lacking any context for understanding why it might have had such an impact, or for that matter upon whom. What could it possibly mean to declare that ‘the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated’? What even was going on with that syntax?

I persevered, and within a few months was prolifically turning out sentences with that sort of syntax myself, copping the stylistic tics of Derrida’s pinwheeling French prose via glitchy English translation. Even a desperate, prophylactic purchase of the conservative critic John M. Ellis’s anti-Derrida polemic Against Deconstruction (1989) could not curb my enthusiasm. The mania took years to pass. But it was a joyful mania, in which boundless intellectual overconfidence joined hands with a conviction that the foundations of the entire Western order of knowledge were trembling. The minutest subversion – an etymological pun in the middle of a sentence, a slight nudge of dissident interpretation at a pivotal point in the analysis of a poem – could be construed as adding to the instability of the structure, pursuing locally and in miniature the grand, global work of deconstruction, which as every reader of Derrida knew had ‘always already’ begun wherever one chose to look for it.

It is probably for the best that Peter Salmon’s brisk, judicious biography eschews imitation of Derrida’s own distinctive way of going about things, opting instead to give a broad survey of the various terrains in which Derrida’s thinking aimed to intervene, alongside a largely sympathetic portrait of the philosopher’s life and times. Where Derrida would typically pitch straight into the midst of things, already entangled in a dozen argumentative strands at once (in Derrida’s words, ‘caught by the game…being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game’), Salmon steps back to take a synoptic view, weighing up the ‘stakes’ of particular philosophical problems, explaining how they might possibly matter. In doing so, he places Derrida within a sort of theatre of reason, as a player concerned as much with dismantling the scenery and stage machinery as with delivering lines of his own. He also, crucially, imparts a proper sense of drama to Derrida’s undertaking, which for all its performative hesitation was also frequently audacious and politically urgent. His Derrida is every bit as exciting as the Derrida I remember being excited about.

Salmon quotes Alain Badiou’s somewhat double-edged description of Derrida as a ‘brave man of peace’, dedicated to finding the points at which entrenched lines of division crossed, inverted or fractally multiplied, creating opportunities for unheard voices to interject (or, equally, for my teenage self to try to do something clever). Much of Derrida’s philosophical method, as Badiou noted, depends on an extreme delicacy of equivocation, and there is always the risk that a biographer or other expositor will put their foot down too heavily in one place or another and this equivocation will collapse, leaving us with an incoherent bundle of opposing cliches. Derrida himself worried about the dangers of an ‘immediate presentation’ of complex thought (he was thinking, in this case, of Heidegger) driven by ‘haste towards platforms and tribunals’, especially in the press, from which ‘armed declarations and morality lessons’ would replace the necessary patience of reading and thinking. Salmon holds this outcome at bay by leaving his subject room to move and breathe within the expository context provided, describing Derrida’s ‘moves’ within that context without trying to fix or encapsulate his exact ‘position’ on a given philosophical topic.

We do not learn, for example, whether Derrida professed a realist or non-realist epistemology, was a social constructionist, believed in the possibility of objective knowledge about reality and so on. On all of these questions, he would undoubtedly have refused to give a simple answer. Salmon’s intellectual portrait makes it clear that there was more to such refusals than the guileful upkeep of a masque of deniability. Derrida addressed himself to philosophy at the level of its metaphysical self-construction, the grounds it gives itself for holding ‘positions’ of this kind at all. At every turn, Derrida showed that the materials from which such constructions are assembled include the very resistant matter over which they seek to rule: for example, that normative theories of linguistic meaning may be scaffolded by metaphors which run out of control in ways those theories cannot wholly predict and account for. Such a demonstration is sometimes thought to entail a claim that all linguistic meaning is inherently unstable, from which supposedly a complete freedom of interpretation would follow (and with it, on some accounts, the general ruin of Western Civilisation). But in fact it is a fairly limited defensive operation carried out against a very particular kind of overweening attempt at absolute stabilisation of meaning by philosophical fiat, one which Derrida identified both with the deepest ambitions of Western metaphysics, and with a type of political oppression with which as an Algerian Jew he was all too familiar.

Despite the tact with which he establishes a rich philosophical backdrop for the themes of Derrida’s life’s work to develop against, Salmon is appropriately trenchant when considering the controversies by which the thinker was assailed when fame overtook him. He gives Derrida’s agonized defence of his friend Paul de Man short shrift, asserting the facts – that de Man was a Nazi collaborator, bigamist, serial fraud and conman who remarkably managed never to get caught – against Derrida’s pleas for an ever-extended deferral of judgement, an ethical ‘patience’ without a credit limit. He is equally unimpressed by those who lined up in the press to denounce Derrida himself as an incomprehensible charlatan peddling dangerous nihilism – so incomprehensible, and so dangerous, that any degree of inattention and misrepresentation was excusable in dismissing his work. Among these, the Cambridge professors who fabricated the phrase ‘logical phallusies’ and insisted that it was typical of Derrida’s abstruse, unserious style despite its never having appeared anywhere in his published texts, stand as exemplars of an all-too familiar form of bad faith. But Salmon also manages to avoid over-identifying with Derrida’s easily-wounded sense of almost metaphysical persecution in these cases, surely a factor in his embarrassing last-ditch defence of de Man.

Salmon’s greatest rebuke to Derrida’s detractors is to show that, far from being systematically incomprehensible, he can be read with understanding, while remaining at a sufficient stylistic and critical distance to avoid simply being lumped in with the presumably bedazzled and misled epigones who endlessly recycle Derridean motifs and signature flourishes. His Derrida is no less important for being human, and no less human for being important. In this biography he appears not as the cosmic hero of my early adulthood, but a passionately idiosyncratic figure whom, at a distance of decades, I find I am still able to admire.