A philosophical tribute is what I believe to be the fitting tribute. A tribute that signals the gap and gives it a power of its own. In order to pay that tribute, I need a few preliminaries, and I will give them here in an extremely simple form.
A justified simplicity. For there was, beneath the astonishing volatile fluidity of his writing, an authentic simplicity about Derrida, an obstinate and unchanging simplicity. That is one of the many reasons for the violence of the attacks on him, just after his death, especially in the American press. The attacks on an ‘abtruse thinker’ and ‘incomprehensible writer’ were no more than the most banal anti-intellectual insults.
Let us call the insults ‘Texan’, and say no more about them.
-Badiou in Pocket Pantheon