Todays Washington Square News has another appreciation of Derrida:

Deconstruction evolved from the ideas of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Writing in the 1920s, Heidegger argued for a radical reinterpretation of human consciousness. He believed the "scourges of modern life" - namely science, technology, and industrial capitalism - wrongly put man at the center of creation and, in turn, alienated him from the fluid essence of everyday experience.

I believe "scourges of modern life" is a Mark Lilla-ism. It was actually modern philosophy that privileged the human subject.

[T]his anthropologically oriented generic philosophy of the Enlightenment first formalized by Descartes in 1637 and still dominant at present. It understands knowledge fundamentally as a property of the individual, as in the rationalism of Descartes, the empiricism of Hobbes and Hume, the transcendentalism of Kant, the existentialism of Kierkegaard, and the empiricism and positivism of the twentieth century.

Grasping the fluid essence of everyday experience is a piece of cake if you have the right boundary conditions.  ¶ 6:46 AM