One reason for my rejection of analytic philosophy was the way the big gun analytic philosophers treated Derrida. He was villified not engaged with. I saw that demonization as an example of cultural insularity, intellectual complacency, philistinism that undercut the universality and ethos of the analytic conception of philosophy.

Simon Crichtley outlines Derrida's significance for philosophy:

In my view, Derrida was a supreme reader of texts, particularly but by no means exclusively philosophical texts. Although, contrary to some Derridophiles, I do not think that he read everything with the same rigour and persuasive power, there is no doubt that the way in which he read a crucial series of authorships in the philosophical tradition completely transformed our understanding of their work and, by implication, of our own work. In particular, I think of his devastating readings of what the French called ‘les trois H’: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, who provided the bedrock for French philosophy in the post-war period and the core of Derrida’s own philosophical formation in the 1950s. But far beyond this, Derrida’s readings of Plato, of Rousseau and other 18th Century authors like Condillac and his relentlessly sharp engagements with more contemporary philosophers like Foucault, Bataille and Levinas, without mentioning his readings of Blanchot, Genet, Artaud, Ponge and so many others, are simply definitive. We should also mention Derrida’s constant attention to psychoanalysis in a series of stunning readings of Freud....Derrida’s philosophical exemplarity consists in the lesson of reading: patient, meticulous, scrupulous, open, questioning reading that is able, at its best, to unsettle its readers’ expectations and completely transform our understanding of the philosopher in question.