It might well appear a strange decision to begin with the work of Jacques Derrida when one of the key features of contemporary affirmationism has been its tendency to claim to have surpassed or exceeded deconstruction. The persistent characterisation of Derrida's oeuvre in negative terms – infinite deferral, delay, marginality, anti- systemic fragmentation and, at worst, theoretical and political paralysis – has often been the starting point for the articulation of new affirmative alternatives. To take one instance, Alain Badiou, in relation to artistic practice, argues that we must ‘renounce the delights of the margin, of obliqueness, of infinite deconstruction, of the fragment, of the exhibition trembling with mortality, of finitude and of the body’. Regarding these forms as complicit with the ideological dynamics of contemporary capitalism Badiou opposes to them the need for ‘monumental construction, projects, the creative force of the weak, [and] the overthrow of established powers’. In the transfer of this schema to the philosophical and theoretical, a polemical gain is made, whereby deconstruction is confined to the past at the expense of the new; in fact, deconstruction is presented as a perpetually prevaricating theoretical endeavour that can never lead to anything new. While this trope has become something of a self- serving leitmotif, it does indicate the unstable position of deconstruction on the threshold of affirmationism or, as I prefer to characterise it, as a ‘weak affirmationism’. In reviewing Derrida’s work we can identify the features of affirmationism that will later take on more solid, and florid, forms.