A deconstructed cheesecake on a restaurant plate and an essay about deconstructing religious faith share a word that began as one of the most challenging philosophical interventions of the 20th century. This episode follows the intellectual biography of Jacques Derrida, starting with the scaffolding he built on: Saussure's view of language as a system of differences and Nietzsche's skepticism about objective truth. From those currents Derrida identified what he called violent hierarchies, binaries like speech over writing or nature over culture where one side is quietly ranked as pure and the other as secondary, and named the Western craving for the immediate the metaphysics of presence.

The conversation unpacks his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the translation of Heidegger's concept that has nothing to do with demolition, the slippery term di ...