For those who don't know much about theory, these courses are a great resource:
http://videolectures.net/yaleengl300s09 ... iterature/

I like the idea of deconstructing a text, and talking of signs and signifies and how they relate in real life; the author of a text; and using philosophy with literacy criticism to object to modern french politics, or ask ethical questions.

Never said i agree with him, and i dont know who calls him a charlatan, but its very interesting.

It is impossible in the abstract to assess this proposition, but surely it bears noting that a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on. Derrida was the bad reader par excellence, who had the gall to conceal his scholarly recklessness within a theoretical framework. He was the figure who did more violence than any other to what Nietzsche had aptly called "the great, the incomparable art of reading well," "of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand" (The Antichrist, sections 59 and 52).

Brian Leiter is a fairly prominent Nietzsche scholar and he runs by far the most important philosophy blog on the internet. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/

I honestly don't know all that much about either Foucault or Derrida at this point, but I do have a fair amount of respect for Foucault based on what I have heard, much moreso than Derrida.