What I really like about Derrida's approach to philosophy is that I've always got the notion that he takes me on a journey. Thereby considering all the diversions possible.
There is that lecture on Van Gogh, Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro included in the compilation "The Truth in Painting". What really stuck in my mind - it's been in the 1990s that I read it and Raimund still has my copy of the book - is how Derrida shows that Van Gogh's actual painting of a pair of shoes had been taken hostage by both, Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro, in their fight over ideologies. On the one hand there is Heidegger making them out to be a peasant's pair of shoes, which of course is tainted by Nazi ideology. On the other hand Meyer Schapiro, realising this flaw, reclaims them to be an industrial worker's, thereby fitting them to a socialist world view. In the end I was asking myself - and I feel that Derrida implied it- whose flaw is greater, the one's, who is obviously infatuated with an ideology, or the one's, who sees somebody else being infatuated with some ideology and only goes and substitutes one for the other. As far as I recall Meyer Schapiro was present, when Derrida presented it.
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