> Though his work on Genet was brilliant. Sartre was much better as a literary
> critic and playwrite than as a philosopher.
"Being and Nothingness", "Critique of Dialectical Reason" are keynote texts of the 20th century, and existentialism in its day played much the same role as post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970-1995 period, i.e. mediations which drove forwards genuine advances in the dialectic.
> I think Derrida is Heideggerian through and through (see caveat above about
> French appropriations of German philosophers).
Poststructuralism just doesn't have much to do with fundamental ontology (unless one takes the position that 1930s monopoly capital is the same thing as 1990s neoliberalism). The trace refers to telecommunicatory sign-systems and highly complex media of dissemination; Derrida is, on a certain level, Minitel's greatest philosopher. But those sign-systems are tied to the mediations of consumer capitalism, not phantasms of autarkic ethnicities or monopoly party-states.
-- Dennis