Bellona Times has roundly brought to bat the quite polarized debate over deconstruction, post-structuralism, postmodernism, and the like. Rather than let deconstructionists take on an all-encompassing role as either saviours or serpents, Ray does what I would do and credits them for their ideas and moves on. The article incisively pinpoints some of the insipient fallout of deconstructionist trends.

Yet I'm surprised that Ray finds Derrida the more pleasurable and intuitive, Foucault trivial, and Baudrillard, what? A demagogue? I truly enjoyed his essay on the late-70s explosion of urban graffitti. And Foucault's passage about that taxonomy Borges invents for "a certain Chinese encyclopedia." Perhaps Borges deserves the real credit here, but Foucault appreciated the value of the piece for an after-structuralist philosophy, and it's a delightful reminder that no single cognitive schema describes everything (at least, perhaps). Alain Badiou interestingly explores Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser's engagement with their respective causes, while bearing in mind their mystifications:

Michel Foucault... [made] the declaration that Man, in the sense of subject, was a constructed historical concept peculiar to a certain order of discourse...

Is this to say, then, that Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan extol an acceptance of the status quo, a kind of cynicism, an indifference to what people suffer? ... exactly the opposite: all three were—each in his own way...—the attentive and courageous militants of a cause. Michel Foucault, for example, maintained a particularly rigorous commitment to a revision of the status of prisoners...

—Badiou, Alain, Ethics

Isn't Derrida the one who simply carries on a language game, for the fun of it, without any engagement? And isn't that the lack of moral tenor that the Happy Tutor laments?