I did read his comments back in '95, and I re-read the comments about Derrida now. (I am not particularly interested in Foucault, so I skipped his reading of h

I did read his comments back in '95, and I re-read the comments about Derrida now. (I am not particularly interested in Foucault, so I skipped his reading of him.) Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed. Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former. So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point. Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.