Thank you for such a clear, concise informative explanation of the thought of Derrida and Foucault. For me, assuming I do understand them, I wonder why they made themselves so difficult to read, when what they had to say, important as it was, is practically self-evident. (Is their prescription dramatically different than "be open-minded and think critically of structures"? In a reply to one of Asia Zanders' responses here, you said "You discuss the important reality that we on the one hand need normative structures but on the other hand are constrained by them. The foundations of shared norms and semantic structures allow us to communicate and work with each other. But as I argue in many of my articles, those normative structures and shared semantics become toxic when they become the only permissible way to act and communicate." Perhaps there are readers who would not understand and appreciate these points without having been talked through them so exhaustively by loquacious Continentals?

One conclusion is we have to start any discourse from a "center" and live with the fact that it will always suffer from misinterpretation and misdirection as a result of human nature, and manage those issues as best we can.

Perhaps a role of philosophers is to specify new "centers" that reflect our best wisdom on what we have learned from human history to date? And that at least take a stab at capturing our best aspirations?