File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0410, message 5


From: shepperd-AT-austincc.edu
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 2004 02:52:27 -0000
Subject: [BOU:] Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74



 Some may be interested in this announcement of the death of Jacques Derrida.    

Jerry Shepperd

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html?ex=1098420225&ei=1&en=3657598de73dc9f5
The New York Times
October 10, 2004
Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74
By JONATHAN KANDELL

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the
most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th
century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office
announced. He was 74.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The
Associated Press reported.

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.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden
meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced
the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of
Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other "dead white male" icons of
Western culture. Architects and designers could claim to take a
"deconstructionist" approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry
and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen
titled one of his movies "Deconstructing Harry," to suggest that his
protagonist could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his
neurotic contradictions.

A Code Word for Discourse

Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word of
intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism - two other
fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from France after World
War II - had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his followers were unwilling -
some say unable - to define deconstruction with any precision, so it has
remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways.

Typical of Mr. Derrida's murky explanations of his philosophy was a 1993 paper
he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which
began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a
thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various aspects of
deconstruction were no more easily accessible. Even some of their titles - "Of
Grammatology," "The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond," and "Ulysses
Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" - could be off-putting to the uninitiated.

"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," Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New
York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine.

Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de
Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed exponent of
deconstruction in the United States. Four years after Mr. de Man's death, it
was revealed that he had contributed numerous pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles
to a newspaper in Belgium, where he was born, while it was under German
occupation during World War II. In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida,
a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's anti-Semitism.

A Devoted Following

Nonetheless, during the 1970's and 1980's, Mr. Derrida's writings and lectures
gained him a huge following in major American universities - in the end, he
proved far more influential in the United States than in France. For young,
ambitious professors, his teachings became a springboard to tenure in
faculties dominated by senior colleagues and older, shopworn philosophies. For
many students, deconstruction was a rite of passage into the world of
rebellious intellect.

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His father was
a salesman. At age 12, he was expelled from his French school when the rector,
adhering to the Vichy government's racial laws, ordered a drastic cut in
Jewish enrollment. Even as a teenager, Mr. Derrida (the name is pronounced
day-ree-DAH) was a voracious reader whose eclectic interests embraced the
philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and
the poet Paul Valéry.

But he could be an indifferent student. He failed his baccalaureate in his
first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the École Normal
Supérieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was
finally admitted in 1952. There he failed the oral portion of his final exams
on his first attempt. After graduation in 1956, he studied briefly at Harvard
University. For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic at
both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure. Yet he did not
defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old.

By the early 1960's, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a rising young
intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language and philosophy in
leading academic journals. He was especially influenced by the German
philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Both were strong critics of
traditional metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which explored the basis and
perception of reality.

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. For many years, he
declined to be photographed for publication. He cut a dashing, handsome figure
at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair, tanned
complexion, and well-tailored suits. He peppered his lectures with puns,
rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like, "Thinking is what we already know
that we have not yet begun," or, "Oh my friends, there is no friend..."

Many readers found his prose turgid and baffling, even as aficionados found it
illuminating. A single sentence could run for three pages, and a footnote even
longer. Sometimes his books were written in "deconstructed" style. For
example, "Glas" (1974) offers commentaries on the German philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the French novelist Jean Genet in parallel columns
of the book's pages; in between, there is an occasional third column of
commentary about the two men's ideas.

"The trouble with reading Mr. Derrida is that there is too much perspiration
for too little inspiration," editorialized The Economist in 1992, when
Cambridge University awarded the philosopher an honorary degree after a
bruising argument among his supporters and critics on the faculty. Elsewhere
in Europe, Mr. Derrida's deconstruction philosophy gained earlier and easier
acceptance.

Shaking Up a Discipline

Mr. Derrida appeared on the American intellectual landscape at a 1966
conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism at Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Its high priest was French anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, who studied societies through their linguistic structure.

Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism was
already passé in France, and that Mr. Lévi-Strauss's ideas were too rigid.
Instead, Mr. Derrida offered deconstruction as the new, triumphant philosophy.

His presentation fired up young professors who were in search of a new
intellectual movement to call their own. In a Los Angeles Times Magazine
article in 1991, Mr. Stephens, the journalism professor, wrote: "He gave
literature professors a special gift: a chance to confront - not as mere
second-rate philosophers, not as mere interpreters of novelists, but as
full-fledged explorers in their own right - the most profound paradoxes of
Western thought."

"If they really read, if they stared intently enough at the metaphors," he
went on, "literature professors, from the comfort of their own easy chairs,
could reveal the hollowness of the basic assumptions that lie behind all our
writings."

Other critics found it disturbing that obscure academics could presume to
denigrate a Sophocles, Voltaire or Tolstoy by seeking out cultural biases and
inexact language in their masterpieces. "Literature, the deconstructionists
frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely
the wrong reasons," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, a British novelist and professor,
in a 1991 article for The New York Times Book Review.

Mr. Derrida's influence was especially strong in the Yale University
literature department, where one of his close friends, a Belgian-born
professor, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champion of deconstruction in
literary analysis. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from war-torn
Europe, and even left the impression among colleagues that he had joined the
Belgian resistance.

But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man's death, research revealed that he
had written over 170 articles in the early 1940's for Le Soir, a Nazi
newspaper in Belgium. Some of these articles were openly anti-Semitic,
including one that echoed Nazi calls for "a final solution" and seemed to
defend the notion of concentration camps.

"A solution to the Jewish problem that aimed at the creation of a Jewish
colony isolated from Europe would entail no deplorable consequences for the
literary life of the West," wrote Mr. de Man.

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the
late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some former
colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit
deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr.
Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even using
literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the
Belgian scholar's newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic.

"Borrowing Derrida's logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that
[Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism," scoffed Peter Lennon, in a
1992 article for The Guardian. According to another critic, Mark Lilla, in a
1998 article in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Derrida's contortionist
defense of his old friend left "the impression that deconstruction means you
never have to say you're sorry."

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation,
also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying
member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Once again, Mr. Derrida was
accused by critics of being irresolute, this time for failing to condemn
Heidegger's fascist ideas.

By the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on both
sides of the Atlantic. But he continued to commute between France and the
United States, where he was paid hefty fees to lecture a few weeks every year
at several East Coast universities and the University of California at Irvine.

Lifting a Mysterious Aura

In his early years of intellectual fame, Mr. Derrida was criticized by
European leftists for a lack of political commitment - indeed, for espousing a
philosophy that attacked the very concept of absolute political certainties.
But in the 1980's, he became active in a number of political causes, opposing
apartheid, defending Czech dissidents and supporting the rights of North
African immigrants in France.

Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He sat still for
photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly mysterious aura to
reveal the mundane details of his personal life.

A former Yale student, Amy Ziering Kofman, focused on him in a 2002
documentary, "Derrida," that some reviewers found charming. "With his unruly
white hair and hawklike face, Derrida is a compelling presence even when he is
merely pondering a question," wrote Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles Times.
"Even his off-the-cuff comments are intriguing, because everything gets
serious consideration. And when he is wary, he's never difficult for its own
sake but because his philosophical positions make him that way."

Rather than hang around the Left Bank cafés traditionally inhabited by French
intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a suburb south
of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his wife, Marguerite
Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst. The couple had two sons, Pierre and Jean. He
also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy teacher who
later married the French political leader Lionel Jospin.

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional
soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television,
watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm
watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time."

Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, what
deconstruction was. "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about
difficulty?" he replied, frostily, to Dinitia Smith, a Times reporter, in a
1998. "Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why are
the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand
enough to understand more."

Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, Mr.
Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will
leave me unsatisfied."

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