Thanks for introducing Irving Singer to sciy readers and sharing your views. About whether Derrida is a one-trick pony or the equal of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, readers can decide for themselves. For myself, I completely disagree with this characterization. On Rorty's "Achieving Our Country," I don't recollect what the last para says, I found the book rather tasteless. He is making a case for nationalist patriotism here, and calling it a progressive leftist stance as against the likes of Derrida, who he sees as practicing a nihilistic critical leftism. Whatever utility nationalism may have in maintaining a precarious peace among peoples in the present world, one may well argue that it moves inevitably towards an ontology of policed identity politics and the very opposite of peace. On the other hand, the contemporary world presents new possibilities for the future which may be called post-nationalistc and it is to these possible subjectivities that the work of Derrida and "that part of academia that Rorty came to criticize" are devoted. In any critical enterprise, it is important first to understand what are the questions the author has set out to answer and why s/he is burdened with these questions. Too often, criticism tends to be an expectation for all thinkers to conform to a certain discursive field and a disappointment when this conformity is not found. Postmodernism comes with new discursive possibilities, in keeping with a new, what may be called a posthumanist orientation. Derrida's contribution here is seminal, both for the thinking of epistemological deconstruction in the messianic structure of subjectivity and its social consequence, "the democracy to come." DB