system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How can we successfully "do philosophy" after Derrida?

When I first read Wittgenstein's _PI_, I was initially worried that the entire discipline of philosophy had been defeated, until I came to the conclusion that Wittgenstein ultimately showed that particular words (e.g. "truth") cannot be given absolute _definitions_, but we can still search for _concepts_ that those particular words resemble.

Now that I am reading more of Derrida, he seems to me to have got even closer than Wittgenstein to defeating philosophy: any word (e.g. "truth") is now not only unable to be given an objective definition, but any _usage_ of the word is indeterminate and "slippery", to steal a Derridean term. How can we engage in the discourses of philosophy if our words "are not ours", so to speak, and their meaning shifts and slips around, unable to be controlled or determined by us? It seems like Wittgenstein disassociates stable definitions from words, and Derrida has disassociated stable/immutable/fixed _meanings_ from them.

Thank you.
gpt
The same way we can have conversations after Derrida.  (Also, the same way we can even have Derrida!). We may have to shift the kinds of questions we ask or the attitude we take toward the projects of philosophy, but Derrida doesn’t make anything impossible unless, paradoxically, he has made his own work impossible too.