Every time I consider the irony that permeates this entire issue, I can’t help but smile. The most popular card in every deck is, by far, the theory card that is most difficult to fit on a four-by-six sheet of cardstock. The white whale of sociology trading cards is Jacques Derrida, the philosopher whose entire career was an argument against tidy summaries, set meanings, and the very kind of tidy compression a stat card represents. Pupils are constantly requesting him. The cards continue to sell out. The most well-liked memento of his ideas is the item he most cautioned against. That seems cosmically appropriate, and I have a suspicion that he would have laughed at it in his somewhat austere manner.
As soon as you attempt to write the “Key Concept” line, the challenge begins. The majority of theorists have a neat grasp. Marx understands materialism in the past. Durkheim understands social facts. Weber understands rationalization and bureaucracy. Derrida understands deconstruction, but the problem is that, unlike those other concepts, deconstruction isn’t actually a method or an ideology.
It’s more akin to a persistent suspicion—a refusal to allow texts to take on a single, unchanging meaning. If you try to explain it in a clean way, you’ve already betrayed it because the whole point is that neat summaries violate the various meanings that any book truly has. Closure is required by the card format. Derrida rejected closure for the entirety of his life. The comedy lies in the crash.
The card’s limited visual space must do its best work because the students who request it nearly always desire to comprehend difference. In order to combine two concepts into one, Derrida substituted the well-known misspelling of the term, différance instead of “-ence. The reason words have any meaning at all is because they are different from one another. The only reason “hot” makes sense is that it’s not “cold.”
Additionally, words postpone their meaning, advancing it via history, context, and subsequent readings without ever reaching a definitive conclusion. The mash-up conveys the idea that meaning is simultaneously created by contrast and held in suspension, never entirely present in any one reading moment, something that standard spelling is unable to do. It’s the kind of realization that makes sense for about thirty seconds before feeling slippery again—exactly what Derrida meant, of course.
The postcard graphic on the front of the nicest card I’ve seen for him pays homage to The Post Card: His peculiar 1980 book, From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, begins with a 250-page collection of personal, disjointed postcards sent to an unidentified recipient. The postcard itself serves as a metaphor for Derrida’s ideas about language, which is why the image works.
Anyone who handles a postcard can read it, its meaning changes depending on who picks it up, its destination is never completely protected, and the original sender’s intent is never totally regained. According to Derrida, every word is a postcard. The audience is not fixed, the author is not present to provide clarification, and the message wavers and veers without ever settling. The closest the format comes to honoring its subject, in my opinion, is placing a postcard on a trading card for a philosopher who claimed that all texts are postcards.
Derrida’s ideas land with an almost intoxicating intensity the first time you understand them, even if you don’t fully understand them. This is what makes Derrida so popular with students, and I believe this is the part that explains the sellouts. When you read him for the first time, there’s a point at which you realize that every assertion of unchanging truth, every self-assured either/or, and every reference to “the meaning” of something is based on layers of contrast and exclusion that the speaker is largely ignorant of. It’s a dizzying experience.
Additionally, it can quickly devolve into the kind of cunning adolescent sophistication that cites Derrida as a justification for rejecting all arguments under the guise of intellectual rigor. Even for someone who finds the format largely appealing, the cards likely speed up both versions of that experience, which is a serious worry.
Particularly in this case, the card critiques are important, and any honest deck must contain them. For as long as he has been writing, Derrida has been accused of mistaking obscurity for depth and of creating prose that is so purposefully opaque that disagreement is impossible since no one can fully understand what has been said.
The most well-known instance of an argument that hasn’t truly faded came in 1992 when a group of analytical philosophers attempted to prevent him from receiving an honorary degree at Cambridge on the grounds that his work didn’t adhere to fundamental requirements of rigor and clarity. He has both genuine supporters and detractors, and a card that claims otherwise is marketing a distorted image of the man. The critique line is one of the best cards. He is revered as a mystic by the weakest.
This raises a more general argument concerning the advantages and disadvantages of the trading-card approach. The format works well for theorists with clear architecture, such as Marx, Durkheim, and Goffman, because their ideas truly have stat-block clarity once you identify the appropriate boxes. The format becomes a fruitful conflict for theorists like Derrida, whose entire purpose was to dismantle the kinds of boxes the cards rely on.
It is unable to capture him, and the inability to do so is instructive in and of itself. Students who work through the gaps in the Derrida card have gained a deeper understanding of deconstruction than those who simply memorize it. The lesson lies in the card’s incompleteness. That’s an oddly Derridean result for a study aid, and it’s arguably the strongest justification for keeping him in the deck.
