±
2004-10-10 04:00:49 UTC
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-derrida10oct10,1,4724559.story?coll=la-home-headlines
8:01 PM PDT, October 9, 2004
French Philosopher Jacques Derrida Dead At 74
By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
Jacques Derrida, the influential French thinker and writer who inspired
admiration, vilification and utter bewilderment as the founder of the
intellectual movement known as deconstruction, has died. He was 74.
Derrida died Friday at a Paris hospital of complications from pancreatic
cancer, French radio reported.
"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary
philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our
time," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement Saturday.
"Through his work, he sought to find the free movement which lies at the
root of all thinking."
Derrida, who divided his time between Paris and the United States, where
he lectured annually at UC Irvine and other universities, was perhaps
the most controversial and daring philosopher of the late 20th century.
He rocked the American academy in a 1966 speech that introduced
deconstruction to the United States as a mode of analysis that sought to
turn Western philosophy on its head.
Deconstruction gained a following on college campuses across the
country, most famously at Yale University in the 1970s and later at UC
Irvine. A notoriously difficult theory, it left an imprint on a number
of fields, particularly literature, where scholars seized on
deconstruction as the basis for radical reinterpretations of classic
works of literature and philosophy. Gradually, disciplines as disparate
as business, architecture, law and religion showed the influence of
Derrida's ideas.
Although deconstruction's influence has waned, it even penetrated
popular culture, where the avant-garde in seemingly everything from
couture to cuisine has been described, rightly or wrongly, as
"deconstructed."
"Of all the philosophers of our time," eminent Stanford University
philosopher Richard Rorty once said, Derrida "has been the most
effective at doing what Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking
the crust of convention, questioning assumptions never before doubted,
raising issues never before discussed."
His detractors were just as vociferous. Some labeled him a nihilist for
his subversion of traditional principles, while others charged him with
deliberate inscrutability.
John Searle, a Mills professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and one of
Derrida's most eloquent critics, once said that what he found most
deplorable about Derrida and deconstruction was "the low level of
philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose,
the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the
appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but
under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."
Critics saw nothing silly about Derrida's defense in the late 1980s of
Paul de Man, a Yale professor and a leading American proponent of
deconstruction who had died earlier that decade. Derrida issued a
60-page essay supporting De Man after reports that De Man, a native of
Belgium, had written for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in the early
1940s. Derrida's critics seized on his defense of De Man as evidence of
deconstruction's apolitical and nihilistic nature.
In 1992, when Cambridge University proposed giving Derrida an honorary
degree, the anti-Derrideans on the faculty raised strenuous objections,
pronouncing his work "absurd," "disabling" and so perverse as to "make
complete nonsense of science, technology and medicine." Their dissent
triggered the first full faculty vote on an honorary degree in 30 years,
but Derrida's supporters prevailed, 336 to 204.
The father of deconstruction was a dapper man with a dark Mediterranean
complexion, bushy brows and a fluffy crown of white hair. The subject of
rock paeans and guidebooks with names like "Derrida for Beginners" and
"Derrida in 90 Minutes," he packed lecture halls with erudite audiences,
who were alternately stimulated and stupefied by his arcane ramblings,
which often lasted hours.
The author of more than 50 books, he tended to convey his ideas in the
most confounding language possible, playing with words and writing
sentences that ran two or three pages long. Critics declared some of his
essays and books unreadable. But what some found unfathomable others
extolled as embodying the elusiveness of meaning, a central tenet of
Derridean thinking.
Derrida rarely satisfied those who sought a straightforward explanation
of deconstruction. When asked by the New York Times some years ago for a
definition, he declined, saying the attempt would only result in
"something which will leave me unsatisfied."
Other times he was more willing to explore, rather than close, the
cognitive abyss. Handing out copies of a particularly confusing poem to
an audience in Irvine a few years ago, he said he wouldn't even attempt
to explain the poem, but he would explain why he wouldn't explain it.
On another occasion, he wrote: "What deconstruction is not? Everything,
of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course!"
What perturbed many of his critics was deconstruction's focus on picking
apart a text, finding the ambiguities and contradictions, and
"deconstructing" them until the surface meaning collapsed.
His famous assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" meant that
such traditional considerations as historical context and an author's
intent were secondary, at best, in the search for the text's meaning.
His approach strove foremost to show that "the text never exactly means
what it says or says what it means," critic Christopher Norris wrote.
And a text, according to Derrida, could be any cultural product, from a
Shakespeare sonnet to a building by architect Frank Gehry.
Derrida's own focus was on philosophical texts by such giants as Plato,
Rene Descartes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He liked to say he operated in
philosophy's margins, looking for the false polarities that he argued
undermined Western logic.
He was reluctant to reveal much about his life, fearful of biographers'
efforts to find cause and effect between his personal history and his
public views. Yet the links were difficult to deny.
Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930, the fifth generation of his family
of assimilated Sephardic Jews to be raised in Algeria.
Although his life was comfortably middle class, his early years were
fraught with tragedy and crisis. Two brothers died in childhood, causing
his mother to panic whenever Derrida showed signs of illness.
In 1940, when he was 10, the Nazi collaborationists who ruled French
Algeria imposed quotas on Jewish school enrollment, and Derrida, the top
student at his academy, was expelled. A teacher said French culture was
"not made for little Jews." He and his family were stripped of their
citizenship.
Although he acknowledged that the anti-Semitism he encountered in
Algeria was nowhere near as oppressive as that in Europe, it enforced
his view of himself as an outsider. "When you are expelled from school
without understanding why, it marks you," he acknowledged in a 2002 L.A.
Weekly interview.
Derrida spent an unhappy interlude in an unofficial Jewish lycee in
Algiers until the end of World War II, when normality returned to the
schools. Often truant during the war, he continued to pay little
attention to his studies, dreaming instead of becoming a professional
soccer player.
According to biographer Paul Strathern, Derrida's interest in philosophy
was piqued when he heard a talk about Albert Camus. Soon Derrida was
reading French writer Andre Gide and poet-philosopher Paul Valery and
filling a diary with quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche and Rousseau.
Near the end of high school, he began to read Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although his grades were poor, his intellectual ability was undeniable:
He was sent to Paris to study for entrance to the Ecole Normale
Superieure, France's most prestigious college. He was admitted in 1952
and plunged into his formal study of philosophy.
He met his future wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, at the Ecole Normale. A
psychoanalyst, she and Derrida were married in 1957. She survives him,
along with their sons, Pierre and Jean.
After graduating in 1956, Derrida spent a year at Harvard University on
a graduate scholarship, then returned to Algeria to serve in the French
army as a teacher.
He moved back to France in 1960 to teach philosophy and logic at the
Sorbonne, but hoped one day to become a citizen of an independent
Algeria. However, when the French colony finally won its independence in
1962, Europeans left en masse and Derrida realized that he would not be
welcomed back. He suffered what Strathern described as a "severe
depressive episode." From this time on he would refer to his sadness as
"nostalgeria."
The same year that Algeria broke free from France, Derrida published his
first important work: a French translation of German philosopher Edmund
Husserl's "Origin of Geometry," for which he wrote a book-length
introduction.
Husserl had argued that geometry began with human intuition about such
basic concepts as line and distance. But the rest of geometry, he
asserted, was independent of human experience its rules and operations
timeless truths just waiting to be discovered.
Derrida questioned the German thinker's logic. How could geometry owe
its creation to intuition and yet be independent of intuition? Derrida
argued that Husserl could not have it both ways. Building on the
assertions of Martin Heidegger, he seized on what philosophers call an
aporia, an internal inconsistency without solution. His reasoning called
into question the whole notion of absolute truth, the basis of Western
philosophy.
Derrida's critique laid the foundation for deconstruction, which seeks
out the hidden assumptions and conflicts that undermine truth. It also
shed light on his view of himself as an "anti-philosopher," whose role
was "an interrogation of [philosophy's] very possibility."
By 1965 Derrida was teaching the history of philosophy at the Ecole
Normale Superieure and was associated with Tel Quel, a leftist magazine
that published work by such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault. Derrida shared with them the desire to overturn conventional
perceptions of writing, literary criticism and philosophy. In 1966,
Derrida addressed a symposium at Johns Hopkins University during which
he took issue with the philosophical and critical movement called
structuralism, which held that all meaning stemmed from "deep
structures" found in a society's myths structures through which the
society defined itself. He argued that what he would later call
deconstruction was a better lens through which to view important
cultural works.
"He was reading texts by Rousseau, Plato and [French poet Stephane]
Mallarme and seeing things nobody ever saw," J. Hillis Miller, an
English professor at Johns Hopkins then who missed Derrida's lecture but
read a transcript soon afterward, told The Times some years ago. Miller
was heavily influenced by Derrida's work and became a leading
deconstructionist at Yale.
The year after his Johns Hopkins address, Derrida signaled his arrival
as a major new thinker with the publication of three seminal volumes:
"Writing and Difference," "Speech and Phenomena" and "Of Grammatology."
"Of Grammatology," his most famous work, focuses on the submerged
dualisms and hierarchies that Derrida considered the foundation of
Western thought. He said that embedded in any text were oppositional
pairs such as good/evil, mind/body, male/female, truth/fiction. He
further said that the first term in any set of such "binary opposites"
is valued or privileged over the second. It is these oppositions,
Derrida argued, that must be deconstructed.
"All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have
proceeded this way," he wrote, "conceiving good to be before evil, the
positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple
before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated
before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture
among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the
most constant, most profound and most potent."
To illustrate how the greatest philosophers contradict themselves, he
often cited Plato's declaration that oral discourse "is written in the
soul of the listener." If speech, as the father of Western thought
asserted, was superior to writing, how could it then be "written" in the
soul? Like a Freudian slip, Plato's choice of words undercut his own
argument, Derrida insisted, demonstrating that speech is not more
authentic or closer to truth than writing. In fact, Derrida believed
that pairs such as speech/writing were not absolute opposites but
linked, as accomplices, so that one had no meaning without the other.
In exposing such false polarities, Derrida aimed to illuminate
alternative or suppressed meanings, a process not dissimilar to a
psychoanalyst's dredging of the subconscious. The deconstructionist
reader shuns the idea that a text can have a single, authoritative
meaning. Most texts, Derrida asserted, have too many meanings, a
condition that he called "undecidability."
"Deconstruction is a way of remembering what our culture is made of," he
told the Times of London some years ago in one of his more cogent
statements, "a way of reanalyzing, for instance, what philosophy is. It
is not simply a matter of theory, but of analyzing the different layers
and assumptions of Western philosophy." What was the point of all this?
Nothing good, Derrida's critics said. "Derrida's influence has been
disastrous," Roger Kimball, a conservative critic, said in a 1994 New
York Times Magazine interview. "He has helped foster a sort of anemic
nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no
longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who
would find that notion risible."
To others, particularly literature professors, deconstruction was a
powerful and subtle tool.
"It was a little like the moment when Helen Keller first understands the
connection between the signing she is being taught and meaning," Barbara
Johnson, a prominent deconstructionist and feminist critic who teaches
English at Harvard, said in a 1991 interview about her first encounter
with Derrida's ideas. "Keller wanted to go back and sign everything; I
wanted to reread everything."
Deconstruction's impact was particularly strong at Yale, where Derrida
became a lecturer in the 1970s and heavily influenced the "Yale school"
of critics a group that included Miller, De Man, Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom. The scholarly center of deconstruction later shifted to UC
Irvine, which recruited Miller in 1986. Later that year, the university
scored a greater coup with Derrida, who became a professor of humanities
there. He taught at Irvine one quarter a year until the spring of 2003,
while maintaining his post as professor of philosophy at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Science in Paris, where he also served as director.
"Our community is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Jacques
Derrida," Karen Lawrence, dean of humanities at UC Irvine, told The
Times on Saturday. "The world has lost one of the most original and
provocative thinkers of the 20th century."
What may have been most threatening about deconstruction was its embrace
of disorder, of the view that the world is not a simple place, reducible
to such absolute concepts as good versus evil, hero versus villain, sane
versus insane.
"I think that people who try to represent what I'm doing or what
so-called deconstruction is doing as, on the one hand, trying to destroy
culture or, on the other hand, to reduce it to a kind of negativity, to
a kind of death, are misrepresenting deconstruction," he once told an
interviewer.
"Deconstruction is essentially affirmative. It's in favor of
reaffirmation of memory, but this reaffirmation of memory asks the most
adventurous and the most risky questions about our tradition, about our
institutions, about our way of teaching, and so on."
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,
8:01 PM PDT, October 9, 2004
French Philosopher Jacques Derrida Dead At 74
By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
Jacques Derrida, the influential French thinker and writer who inspired
admiration, vilification and utter bewilderment as the founder of the
intellectual movement known as deconstruction, has died. He was 74.
Derrida died Friday at a Paris hospital of complications from pancreatic
cancer, French radio reported.
"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary
philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our
time," French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement Saturday.
"Through his work, he sought to find the free movement which lies at the
root of all thinking."
Derrida, who divided his time between Paris and the United States, where
he lectured annually at UC Irvine and other universities, was perhaps
the most controversial and daring philosopher of the late 20th century.
He rocked the American academy in a 1966 speech that introduced
deconstruction to the United States as a mode of analysis that sought to
turn Western philosophy on its head.
Deconstruction gained a following on college campuses across the
country, most famously at Yale University in the 1970s and later at UC
Irvine. A notoriously difficult theory, it left an imprint on a number
of fields, particularly literature, where scholars seized on
deconstruction as the basis for radical reinterpretations of classic
works of literature and philosophy. Gradually, disciplines as disparate
as business, architecture, law and religion showed the influence of
Derrida's ideas.
Although deconstruction's influence has waned, it even penetrated
popular culture, where the avant-garde in seemingly everything from
couture to cuisine has been described, rightly or wrongly, as
"deconstructed."
"Of all the philosophers of our time," eminent Stanford University
philosopher Richard Rorty once said, Derrida "has been the most
effective at doing what Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking
the crust of convention, questioning assumptions never before doubted,
raising issues never before discussed."
His detractors were just as vociferous. Some labeled him a nihilist for
his subversion of traditional principles, while others charged him with
deliberate inscrutability.
John Searle, a Mills professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and one of
Derrida's most eloquent critics, once said that what he found most
deplorable about Derrida and deconstruction was "the low level of
philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose,
the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the
appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but
under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."
Critics saw nothing silly about Derrida's defense in the late 1980s of
Paul de Man, a Yale professor and a leading American proponent of
deconstruction who had died earlier that decade. Derrida issued a
60-page essay supporting De Man after reports that De Man, a native of
Belgium, had written for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in the early
1940s. Derrida's critics seized on his defense of De Man as evidence of
deconstruction's apolitical and nihilistic nature.
In 1992, when Cambridge University proposed giving Derrida an honorary
degree, the anti-Derrideans on the faculty raised strenuous objections,
pronouncing his work "absurd," "disabling" and so perverse as to "make
complete nonsense of science, technology and medicine." Their dissent
triggered the first full faculty vote on an honorary degree in 30 years,
but Derrida's supporters prevailed, 336 to 204.
The father of deconstruction was a dapper man with a dark Mediterranean
complexion, bushy brows and a fluffy crown of white hair. The subject of
rock paeans and guidebooks with names like "Derrida for Beginners" and
"Derrida in 90 Minutes," he packed lecture halls with erudite audiences,
who were alternately stimulated and stupefied by his arcane ramblings,
which often lasted hours.
The author of more than 50 books, he tended to convey his ideas in the
most confounding language possible, playing with words and writing
sentences that ran two or three pages long. Critics declared some of his
essays and books unreadable. But what some found unfathomable others
extolled as embodying the elusiveness of meaning, a central tenet of
Derridean thinking.
Derrida rarely satisfied those who sought a straightforward explanation
of deconstruction. When asked by the New York Times some years ago for a
definition, he declined, saying the attempt would only result in
"something which will leave me unsatisfied."
Other times he was more willing to explore, rather than close, the
cognitive abyss. Handing out copies of a particularly confusing poem to
an audience in Irvine a few years ago, he said he wouldn't even attempt
to explain the poem, but he would explain why he wouldn't explain it.
On another occasion, he wrote: "What deconstruction is not? Everything,
of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course!"
What perturbed many of his critics was deconstruction's focus on picking
apart a text, finding the ambiguities and contradictions, and
"deconstructing" them until the surface meaning collapsed.
His famous assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" meant that
such traditional considerations as historical context and an author's
intent were secondary, at best, in the search for the text's meaning.
His approach strove foremost to show that "the text never exactly means
what it says or says what it means," critic Christopher Norris wrote.
And a text, according to Derrida, could be any cultural product, from a
Shakespeare sonnet to a building by architect Frank Gehry.
Derrida's own focus was on philosophical texts by such giants as Plato,
Rene Descartes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He liked to say he operated in
philosophy's margins, looking for the false polarities that he argued
undermined Western logic.
He was reluctant to reveal much about his life, fearful of biographers'
efforts to find cause and effect between his personal history and his
public views. Yet the links were difficult to deny.
Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930, the fifth generation of his family
of assimilated Sephardic Jews to be raised in Algeria.
Although his life was comfortably middle class, his early years were
fraught with tragedy and crisis. Two brothers died in childhood, causing
his mother to panic whenever Derrida showed signs of illness.
In 1940, when he was 10, the Nazi collaborationists who ruled French
Algeria imposed quotas on Jewish school enrollment, and Derrida, the top
student at his academy, was expelled. A teacher said French culture was
"not made for little Jews." He and his family were stripped of their
citizenship.
Although he acknowledged that the anti-Semitism he encountered in
Algeria was nowhere near as oppressive as that in Europe, it enforced
his view of himself as an outsider. "When you are expelled from school
without understanding why, it marks you," he acknowledged in a 2002 L.A.
Weekly interview.
Derrida spent an unhappy interlude in an unofficial Jewish lycee in
Algiers until the end of World War II, when normality returned to the
schools. Often truant during the war, he continued to pay little
attention to his studies, dreaming instead of becoming a professional
soccer player.
According to biographer Paul Strathern, Derrida's interest in philosophy
was piqued when he heard a talk about Albert Camus. Soon Derrida was
reading French writer Andre Gide and poet-philosopher Paul Valery and
filling a diary with quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche and Rousseau.
Near the end of high school, he began to read Jean-Paul Sartre.
Although his grades were poor, his intellectual ability was undeniable:
He was sent to Paris to study for entrance to the Ecole Normale
Superieure, France's most prestigious college. He was admitted in 1952
and plunged into his formal study of philosophy.
He met his future wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, at the Ecole Normale. A
psychoanalyst, she and Derrida were married in 1957. She survives him,
along with their sons, Pierre and Jean.
After graduating in 1956, Derrida spent a year at Harvard University on
a graduate scholarship, then returned to Algeria to serve in the French
army as a teacher.
He moved back to France in 1960 to teach philosophy and logic at the
Sorbonne, but hoped one day to become a citizen of an independent
Algeria. However, when the French colony finally won its independence in
1962, Europeans left en masse and Derrida realized that he would not be
welcomed back. He suffered what Strathern described as a "severe
depressive episode." From this time on he would refer to his sadness as
"nostalgeria."
The same year that Algeria broke free from France, Derrida published his
first important work: a French translation of German philosopher Edmund
Husserl's "Origin of Geometry," for which he wrote a book-length
introduction.
Husserl had argued that geometry began with human intuition about such
basic concepts as line and distance. But the rest of geometry, he
asserted, was independent of human experience its rules and operations
timeless truths just waiting to be discovered.
Derrida questioned the German thinker's logic. How could geometry owe
its creation to intuition and yet be independent of intuition? Derrida
argued that Husserl could not have it both ways. Building on the
assertions of Martin Heidegger, he seized on what philosophers call an
aporia, an internal inconsistency without solution. His reasoning called
into question the whole notion of absolute truth, the basis of Western
philosophy.
Derrida's critique laid the foundation for deconstruction, which seeks
out the hidden assumptions and conflicts that undermine truth. It also
shed light on his view of himself as an "anti-philosopher," whose role
was "an interrogation of [philosophy's] very possibility."
By 1965 Derrida was teaching the history of philosophy at the Ecole
Normale Superieure and was associated with Tel Quel, a leftist magazine
that published work by such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault. Derrida shared with them the desire to overturn conventional
perceptions of writing, literary criticism and philosophy. In 1966,
Derrida addressed a symposium at Johns Hopkins University during which
he took issue with the philosophical and critical movement called
structuralism, which held that all meaning stemmed from "deep
structures" found in a society's myths structures through which the
society defined itself. He argued that what he would later call
deconstruction was a better lens through which to view important
cultural works.
"He was reading texts by Rousseau, Plato and [French poet Stephane]
Mallarme and seeing things nobody ever saw," J. Hillis Miller, an
English professor at Johns Hopkins then who missed Derrida's lecture but
read a transcript soon afterward, told The Times some years ago. Miller
was heavily influenced by Derrida's work and became a leading
deconstructionist at Yale.
The year after his Johns Hopkins address, Derrida signaled his arrival
as a major new thinker with the publication of three seminal volumes:
"Writing and Difference," "Speech and Phenomena" and "Of Grammatology."
"Of Grammatology," his most famous work, focuses on the submerged
dualisms and hierarchies that Derrida considered the foundation of
Western thought. He said that embedded in any text were oppositional
pairs such as good/evil, mind/body, male/female, truth/fiction. He
further said that the first term in any set of such "binary opposites"
is valued or privileged over the second. It is these oppositions,
Derrida argued, that must be deconstructed.
"All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have
proceeded this way," he wrote, "conceiving good to be before evil, the
positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple
before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated
before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture
among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the
most constant, most profound and most potent."
To illustrate how the greatest philosophers contradict themselves, he
often cited Plato's declaration that oral discourse "is written in the
soul of the listener." If speech, as the father of Western thought
asserted, was superior to writing, how could it then be "written" in the
soul? Like a Freudian slip, Plato's choice of words undercut his own
argument, Derrida insisted, demonstrating that speech is not more
authentic or closer to truth than writing. In fact, Derrida believed
that pairs such as speech/writing were not absolute opposites but
linked, as accomplices, so that one had no meaning without the other.
In exposing such false polarities, Derrida aimed to illuminate
alternative or suppressed meanings, a process not dissimilar to a
psychoanalyst's dredging of the subconscious. The deconstructionist
reader shuns the idea that a text can have a single, authoritative
meaning. Most texts, Derrida asserted, have too many meanings, a
condition that he called "undecidability."
"Deconstruction is a way of remembering what our culture is made of," he
told the Times of London some years ago in one of his more cogent
statements, "a way of reanalyzing, for instance, what philosophy is. It
is not simply a matter of theory, but of analyzing the different layers
and assumptions of Western philosophy." What was the point of all this?
Nothing good, Derrida's critics said. "Derrida's influence has been
disastrous," Roger Kimball, a conservative critic, said in a 1994 New
York Times Magazine interview. "He has helped foster a sort of anemic
nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no
longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who
would find that notion risible."
To others, particularly literature professors, deconstruction was a
powerful and subtle tool.
"It was a little like the moment when Helen Keller first understands the
connection between the signing she is being taught and meaning," Barbara
Johnson, a prominent deconstructionist and feminist critic who teaches
English at Harvard, said in a 1991 interview about her first encounter
with Derrida's ideas. "Keller wanted to go back and sign everything; I
wanted to reread everything."
Deconstruction's impact was particularly strong at Yale, where Derrida
became a lecturer in the 1970s and heavily influenced the "Yale school"
of critics a group that included Miller, De Man, Geoffrey Hartman and
Harold Bloom. The scholarly center of deconstruction later shifted to UC
Irvine, which recruited Miller in 1986. Later that year, the university
scored a greater coup with Derrida, who became a professor of humanities
there. He taught at Irvine one quarter a year until the spring of 2003,
while maintaining his post as professor of philosophy at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Science in Paris, where he also served as director.
"Our community is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Jacques
Derrida," Karen Lawrence, dean of humanities at UC Irvine, told The
Times on Saturday. "The world has lost one of the most original and
provocative thinkers of the 20th century."
What may have been most threatening about deconstruction was its embrace
of disorder, of the view that the world is not a simple place, reducible
to such absolute concepts as good versus evil, hero versus villain, sane
versus insane.
"I think that people who try to represent what I'm doing or what
so-called deconstruction is doing as, on the one hand, trying to destroy
culture or, on the other hand, to reduce it to a kind of negativity, to
a kind of death, are misrepresenting deconstruction," he once told an
interviewer.
"Deconstruction is essentially affirmative. It's in favor of
reaffirmation of memory, but this reaffirmation of memory asks the most
adventurous and the most risky questions about our tradition, about our
institutions, about our way of teaching, and so on."
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,