Yeh Derrida honestly deserved alot of the contempt he can get. Yes he was smart. Yeah there are a couple interesting ideas in his writings. But all in all his work is useless. There is no real systematic method or content to his philosophy. It is not materialist, but methodologically idealist (see Perry Anderson's book, Considerations of Western Marxism; there's a chapter where he attacks that generation of French thinkers, in particular Derrida, Lacan, but also Foucault and Deleuze).

I personally have no idea whether or not he was CIA lol. I think it suffices that we know that the Western intelligence officers who were forced to read this generation of French thinkers (incl. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, etc.) were glad at least that this broad post-structural school was displacing Marxism which was dominant on the left before that. Honestly Guattari is just bad. Every solo book of his I read the reasoning and methodology are just really poor imo. With Deleuze, who I think is a far more impressive philosopher (and its clearest in his more historical books on other thinkers, but there takes massive historical and interpretive liberties), I understand anarchists digging it, but I don't really understand why Marxists are still trying to identify with his thought when anything slightly Marxist which he says can simply be reformulated in a more systematic, rigorous dialectical materialism.

In all honestly it appealed to a post-68 generation in France and the US (hence the birth of the very yank field of 'French Theory') of largely petit-bourgeois wannabe intellectuals who, in the throes of protagonist and imposter syndrome, and in the context of the failure of the broad left in this period, notably due to reformism and opportunism (in 68, the PCF - French Communist Party - in particular really failed to push for a general strike and since have simply become a reactionary reformist and opportunist party) wanted to appear like they were still doing something radical. No praxis obvs. Instead we're going to intellectually masturbate and 'deconstruct' everything (the term has seemed to mean very different things to different thinkers, which it fitting for deconconstruction as a 'school'). There were still many genuinely radical communists, but you're unlikely to find them in academia. Luckily the University of Nanterre is basically just commies hehe.

Like I'm willing to admit that there's something a bit dialectical in some moments of deconstruction but overall its a mess and the actual ideas or content within his writings really do not justify the labyrinth of actually trying to understand them. I get that he thinks it is necessary to get you into the habit of thinking of deconstruction which requires a rejection of any absolute distinction between the form of the writing and its content, but yh without going into detail I think its bullshit and was a waste of my time reading it.

For a good, but summary takedown of this whole current of thought there's a book by Perry Anderson (a trot, btw; I also have criticisms of this book), Considerations on Western Marxism Ah yes Heidegger. It's very difficult to find anyone in that generation of French philosophy who wasn't influenced by Heidegger, including many on the left. There were French Marxists who today are almost unknown who rejected him, but the most influential French Marxists thinkers (Badiou, Lefebvre, Balibar, Althusser) still engage with his work.

Heidegger's main idea is the difference between Being an * beings* saying that 'the ** Being** of beings is not itself a being). Beings are what are studied in what Heidegger called 'ontic sciences', which is most people's ideas of sciences or fields of knowledge, or the broader German idea of Wissenschaft. You can think of them as entities in general. But Being, which is studied in ontology, and so is part of philosophy proper, not the empirical sciences, although Heidegger thinks that it must be studied phenomenologically (read: his weird version of phenomenology), rather than through observation, experiment or rational reflection. Its in his belief that the way Being appears to us is through our Dasein (our essential structure of being-there which he thinks define human nature) that his nationalism and Nazism gets its philosophical source. Obvs materialistically there are other reasons, like his class position. I can understand Heidegger's influence in academic at least because this is the type of question that academic philosophers love. Is it useful for class struggle? No (sorry Badiou). It is useful for philosophy more broadly, even just intellectually? Probably not, imo.

I sometimes compare him to Carl Schmitt, another example of unrependent Nazi slime, because Schmitt's idea's are actually more interesting to me as a Marxist because he was actually a liberal who supported Nazism (i.e. a liberal Nazi), and so is interesting as proof of the idea that if you 'scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds', and because his concept of politics as essentially mediated by the friend-enemy distinction and his ideas on sovereignty are genuinely interesting and capture something about politics imo, which could be interpreted materialistically. Schmitt understood his writings as an internal critique of the liberal tradition, where he thought most liberals had lost sight of the real nature of politics, of the essential distinction friend-enemy. There's a reason many Marxists have also been interested in him.