Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #5
Rene Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jaques Derrida

Rene Descartes. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated from the French and Latin by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998.
Not much to add to this other than what is in our story, which is a synthesis and combination of these two books: the first written in French for the common people, the second a Latin expansion for the muckety-mucks at the Sorbonne. Descartes is great fun to read, and I highly recommend this tiny little tome (103 pages) to any and all. Believe you me when I say it will change the way you think about thinking!

Jean-Paul Sartre. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert and Lionel Abel. New York: Vintage International, 1989.
Of all of Sartre's many hats, I prefer his dramatist chapeau the most; I don't think I'm alone in that. The Flies, summarized in our story, is also in this collection.

Derrida. Dirs. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Jane Doe Films, 2002.
Our first movie in Recommending Reading, and that's because I am pretty sure that telling people to go out and actually read Derrida is a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Seriously, though by writing this story my stance toward Derrida has softened from the absolute contempt and hatred I had for his work in undergrad, I still cannot help but think of him as The Annoying Five-Year-Old of Western Thought: constantly arguing with and questioning everything that comes out of other people's mouths, while not adding much by way of substance to the conversation himself. It is the philosophy equivalent of constantly asking "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" "Why?" (Hence the 5 year-old analogy.) Derrida's only setting is Attack the Establishment Mode, and that is largely why I think Americans love him so much. I just find it all rather tedious and simplistic...and that is just when I can figure out what the hell he's talking about, which is not often.

So, that said: Check out this documentary, completed only a couple years before Derrida died. See Derrida butter a muffin! See Derrida cross the street while a middle-aged American in a leather jacket complains about Americans! See Derrida's wife tell him not to forget his keys! See Derrida refuse to expound extemporaneously about love!

The film accurately synthesizes the experience of reading Derrida. If you can cinematically put up with the man for more than ten minutes, go back and check out his books. For you gluttons for punishment, I'd suggest starting with Speech and Phenomena, which contains the famous essay "Differance."