PRESTOPUNDIT

"DECONSTRUCTIONIST" JACQUES DERRIDA, the famed French language theorist, is dead. In recent years Derrida was an Orange Country, U.S.A. fixture teaching at UC-Irvine. He inspired otherwise serious folks of my acquaintance to use mimed "quotes" above spoken words with bouncing paired fingers raised over the head -- years before Saturday Night Live made fun of the practice. I first ran into the ideas of Derrida in early '80s studying literary criticism -- just before the real Derrida craze made its run through the grad schools. Soon enough even serious legal theorists and "continental" philosophers where taking up ersatz Derrida for their own purposes. By the time I began advanced studies in philosophy, the effect of Derrida (and Foucault) on marginally talented lefty grad students was a bit like heroin. You might say I saw "the second-rate minds of my generation destroyed" by the snake-swallowing language games of Jacques Derrida.

True enough, Derrida was right to oppose the Platonic theory of meaning -- but unfortunately he had nothing sensible to replace it with, only an extended reductio ad absurdum via a madness of puns and metaphor without end. His own approach could have learned much from infinitely more profound anti-Plantonic work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Derrida in his American years had no time for that, he was far more interested in playing word games, as he did when I saw him give the lectures published as Spectres of Marx. The Derrida I saw was a "joke" -- laughable and yet seriously repellent at the same time.

So lets give Derrida a thumbs up for his anti-Plantonism and a thumbs down for his mistaken view of language, truth, and literature. And a big, big thumbs down for his truly dismal influence on fashion hungry second-raters the world over.

From the London Telegraph:

Jacques Chirac, the French president, said yesterday that in Prof Derrida, "France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major intellectual figures of our time". Prof Derrida's work pioneered a complex and controversial form of philosophy which interpreted different kinds of human thought and knowledge as ambiguous "texts" with multiple and apparently endless layers of meaning. The method, though often impenetrable, had an enormous impact on literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture. Over a 40-year career, the flamboyant doyen of Parisian intellectuals became one of the best-known and controversial philosophers in the world - loathed, adored and seldom fully comprehended .. While his followers acclaimed him a playful genius of language, critics said he merely created an obscure form of relativism, in which anything could mean anything. His famously difficult and literary style made him particularly unpopular among many English and American philosophers, most of them reared in the tradition of plain-speaking Anglo-Saxon thought.

On the continent .. Prof Derrida was a celebrated figure - akin to a pop star among students. In recent years, he began to intervene regularly in political debates. In a debate on global terrorism, he refused to describe September 11 attacks as an act of "international terrorism", arguing that "an act of 'international terrorism' is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we are trying to discuss".

From the NY Times:

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.

While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in Europe - he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive political causes.

From the Guardian:

Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning. Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida's philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to western values.

From Le Monde:

Il était le dernier survivant de ces penseurs des années 60, catalogués "penseurs de 68", (Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, etc..), grands pourfendeurs de la notion de "sujet" .. Jacques Derrida, qui portait beau une épaisse chevelure blanche, propose, à partir de textes philosophiques classiques, une "déconstruction", une critique des présupposés de la parole, une manière de défaire de l'intérieur un système de pensée dominant.

[English translation].

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BLOGOSPHERE REACTIONS: Michelle Malkin -- "DING DONG! DERRIDA IS DEAD":

Dan Flynn has a great chapter on Derrida in his new book [Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas].

Jack Balkin -- "Derrida was an important influence in my intellectual life":

Perhaps the most important thing to say about Derrida is that he was not a Derridean. Other people made use of his work in ways that would probably have horrified him.

David Carr -- "The End of an Earache":

.. to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.

Technorati search "Derrida". Posted by Greg Ransom