A LETTER TO THE NY TIMES
signed by
the friends of Jacques Derrida. So far 2650 Derridians -- mostly academics -- have signed the letter:
To the Editors of the NY Times:
Jonathan Kandell�s obituary for Jacques Derrida is mean-spirited and uninformed. To characterize Derrida, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, as an "Abstruse Theorist" is to employ criteria which would disqualify Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Heisenberg.
With scarcely concealed xenophobia, Kandell describes deconstruction as another of those "fashionable, slippery philosophies that ... emerged from France ... undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education." In fact, Derrida wrestled with central works of the Western tradition, including Plato, Shakespeare, and the Declaration of Independence - none of which he slighted.
Kandell reports that "many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction�s demise--if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it." Whether Mr. Kandall's article is "unmalicious" we will leave to others to decide. There can be no question, however, that it does everything it can to "relieve" readers "of the burden of trying to understand" Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, by celebrating the demise of both. The New York Times has done its readers an injustice in publishing such a dismissive article as its official obituary.
Sincerely
Samuel Weber
Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, Northwestern University
Kenneth Reinhard
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UCLA
UPDATE:
Gregg Easterbrook on Derrida:
[Ralph] Keyes [author of The Post-Truth Era] blames the decline of respect for truth partly on intellectual modernism and postmodernism. Intellectuals, he says, crusaded to convince people that there are no absolute truths, that everything is contingent or based on frames of reference. Calamity descended as people actually decided to believe this. Postmodernism's worst idea has infected popular culture, and now millions of Americans and Europeans believe that nothing is really truth. Even though most people who watch docudramas or read self-serving "fictionalized" memoirs have never heard of Jacques Derrida or Paul Feyerabend, antitruth ideas they and others championed are loose in popular culture, driving discourse downward.
Since Derrida died nine days ago, it's fair to ask whether he should be assigned some blame for the post-truth state of public debate--intellectuals, after all, must accept responsibility if their ideas do harm rather than good. Derrida was a strangely polarizing figure: His followers considered him an oracle while his detractors viewed him with absurdly exaggerated alarm. Some of what Derrida maintained was inarguably true: for example, that writers can never really escape the confines of language structure nor free themselves of the conventional assumptions of society, which impose psychological limits on creativity. That's a powerful critique. Of course, if the critique is inarguably true, then how does it jibe with Derrida's additional contention that nothing can be inarguably true? Off you go into the postmodernism hall of mirrors, and pretty soon you are all the way back to fretting about whether the chair is actually there.
I think Derrida and others in his general camp do share some of the blame for declining public respect for the notion that some things are true and other things are not true. Intellectuals like to curse the benighted public for not grasping academic theories, but the worst aspect of postmodernism (which is now an old enough term that we ought to be saying apr�s-modernism, perhaps) is that the public actually did grasp it. While the ideas of, say, metaphysicians currently have no bearing on public culture, the ideas of the deconstructionists and postmodernists are prevalent in movies, pop fiction, and politics. It's a worst-case outcome.
Posted by Greg Ransom
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