My pick of Derrida:

For philosophical  meat and potatoes, the essays in Writing and
Difference, especially Cogito and the History of Madness (on Foucault)
and Violence and Metaphysics (on Levinas), but also the essay on
Jabes. Plato's Pharmacy, in Dissemination, is great too, although
goodness only knows what a proper classicist would make of it.

Try the essay Signature Event Context (on J. L. Austin, published in
one translation in Peggy Kamuf's Derrida Reader and in another in a
volume titled Limited Inc) for something of more or less direct
critical usefulness. Limited Inc itself, a polemical exchange with
Searle about Austin, entertained me greatly when I was 18, but maturer
souls may find it wears a bit thin.

Spurs (on Nietzsche) was published in a dual-language edition, with
French text facing English. It's short, clever, funny and provoking,
and the dimensions of the volume are such that you can slip it into
the hip pocket of an overcoat and about a third of it will poke pinkly
out of the top. Warning: in some parts of the country (predominantly
Cultural Materialist campuses, say) this may get you beaten up.

Signeponge (Sign-sponge / signs Ponge - on Francis Ponge) was also
published in a dual-language edition. It's seriously weird, as befits
its subject.

I love The Post Card, with the first part's conceit of having been
written on the backs of a stack of postcards of Plato and Socrates
procured from the Bodleian library. (I used to have a few of these
myself; I dare say quite a lot of people did). The essays on Freud and
Lacan in that volume are very good also.

Of the later works, The Gift of Death (on Jan Patocka and Kierkegaard)
and Given Time: Counterfeit Money (on Marcel Maus and Baudelaire) are
comparatively concise, cogent and readable - more "human" in style. On
The Name has a very interesting essay on Angelus Silesius and negative
theology (there was a time when I thought I might be going to write a
PhD thesis on Derrida and negative theology. Seems like another life
now). I liked Spectres of Marx more than most marxists seem to have -
parts of it seem prophetic now, as when he talks about the fissures in
the neo-liberal vision of economic globalisation and heaps scorn on
the triumphalism of Fukuyama & co.

The Politics of Friendship, much of which is about Schmitt and the
concepts of "depoliticisation", "the sovereign" and "the enemy", seems
similarly prophetic. There is much that is Schmittian about the
current geopolitical dispensation. And, given that Schmitt was an
unrepentant Nazi, that's a worrying thought.

Memoires for Paul de Man is quite moving in places, and Derrida's
discussion of de Man's writings in the collaborationist newspaper Le
Soir are a model, I think, of how to deal critically and patiently
with such things. Derrida does not exonerate de Man, but shows where
the onus lies and how one might begin to reckon with it.

For a single-volume entree into DerridaWorld, I would have to
recommend Points..., a collection of interviews. An earlier volume of
interviews, titled Positions, was both pitifully short and pitilessly
overpriced, and was widely photocopied in consequence. Points... is
rather better value for money, and has a nice picture on the cover of
Derrida sitting in front of a piano and smoking a pipe - bouffant
hairdo immovably intact.

I have never read Of Grammatology all the way through.

Dominic