[I]t is not entirely clear what it is to be a post-deconstructive realist about the thing, since both 'realism' and 'thing' are here given unusual interpretations. Marder is perhaps right in implying that Derrida is not a common-sense realist about middle-sized dry goods, say, but just how Derrida diverges from such a view is left unclear. Sure our washing machine exists independently of us, for Derrida, but that doesn't get us very far into understanding it, and Derrida's post-Heideggerian view seems to be that there are multiple senses of 'real' and, moreover, that a commitment to common-sense realism fails to see the genealogical conditions for what presents itself, or in Marder's and Deleuze's terms, the virtual that subsists.
I think one way to look at Derrida is to take him as saying that the very question of realism is taken in terms of "presence." So the traditional debate over realism, whether in the late 19th century in America or in Germany, is a debate between two kinds of presence. Derrida can't fall into this because he has to make room for absence. Both absence as simply not-present but also absence as what is excluded by the very present/absent taxonomy.
I take Derrida as a realist, very much akin to how I take Heidegger as a realist. But he's a kind of absent realist.
While I think the "virtual that subsists" captures a bit of this, I think it misses the more interesting part of what isn't even virtual. (Since virtuality is still a kind of presence)
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