Throughout Stay True, Hsu refers to the work of a number of scholars and writers, including Aristotle, Marcel Mauss, and Martin Heidegger. Of particular importance is the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whom Hsu cites in order to describe his unlikely bond with Ken. Given that Derrida has long had a reputation for being a difficult – some would even say incomprehensible – thinker, it is worthwhile to briefly summarize his life and work.
Derrida was born to a French Algerian Jewish family in 1930. Growing up in the city of Algiers, then a French colony, the young Derrida faced antisemitism during the Second World War. In 1949, he immigrated to Paris where he studied at the renowned École Normale Supérieure. After teaching at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964, Derrida was appointed as a professor at his alma mater, the École Normale Supérieure, in 1964 (for more on Derrida's early life see: Lawlor, 2022).
Derrida first gained international notoriety at a 1966 conference at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. His lecture, titled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" presented a direct challenge to many previous philosophical understandings. The presentation caused such a sensation that, reflecting on the event over two decades later, Derrida claimed "what is now called 'theory' in this country may even have an essential link with what is said to have happened there in 1966" (1990, p. x).
The Following year, 1967, Derrida published his first major work, Of Grammatology. While the work resists a synopsized explanation, Hsu offers a helpful summary of Derrida's project in Stay True: “Derrida wanted to disrupt our drive to generate meaning through dichotomies—speech versus writing, reason versus passion, masculinity versus femininity. These seeming opposites were mutually constitutive. Just because one concept prevailed over the other didn’t mean that either was stable or self-defined; straightness exists only by continually marginalizing queerness, for instance" (p. 56).
In Stay True, Hsu engages with Derrida's work on friendship. Derrida began lecturing about friendship in the early 1990s, and his thoughts on the matter were collected in the volume The Politics of Friendship published in 1994. Drawing on the work of philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, Derrida endeavors to offer an account of how the meaning and practice of friendship has changed over time. While a work of characteristic breadth and difficulty, scholar Fred Dallmayr concludes that Derrida's overarching message is of "friendship...as a kind of transcendental-spiritual goal" (1999, p. 110). For Hsu, this manifests in Derrida's claim that “the intimacy of friendship... lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another" (p. 59).
For his difficult, highly abstract philosophical works, Derrida faced a large amount of criticism. In a famously vitriolic obituary for The New York Times, writer Jonathan Kandell claimed that "Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence" (p. 2004, par. 3). Nearly twenty years after his death, Derrida's controversial reputation persists. With Stay True, however, Hsu shows us how we can finding meaning, and indeed solace, in the work of this unique and daring philosopher.
