Jacques Derrida died in 2004 of pancreatic cancer. Somewhat predictably for those who have followed his career to any extent his death did meet with some controversy, in particular the initial obituary in the New York Times entitled Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74 which can be read here.
This letter brought a series of letters of complaint (to which the paper did respond with two more favourable articles on Derrida) principally from some of the staff of UCI. Their letter can be read here humanities.uci.edu/rememberi … letter.htm
and a list of other letters can be read here humanities.uci.edu/rememberi … r_list.htm
Now I haven’t read all of these letters but I am willing to discuss almost any aspect of the controversy and have written on the topic before. This is just a little informative post, if it spawns a discussion then all the better but if not then so be it.
I found out that Derrida was still alive about 3 days before he died. My disappointment was, as they say, ‘touching in a juvenile kind of way’.
A little while after this, my girlfriend changed her name on my phone to ‘Derrida’, and started sending messages like; “You killed me, James…” and; “What have you done?” It was rather amusing.
I can’t find the interview ‘The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable’ online so I’ll have to copy this rather lucid passage from the book myself (see the lengths I go to for you lot?):
Now it would take me about an hour to go through this one passage and explain what I think that it means, so if Jacques was just playing us all for fools then he’s an even better philosopher than his ‘fans’ believe. To the uninitiated this probably seems like total gibberish…
Basically, that the NY Times published an article which drew widespread protest from concerned colleagues and other readers of his work. This sort of argument characterised Derrida’s career, most notably during the nonsense that surrounded the decision by Cambridge to award him an honorary degree.
In other words you didn’t mean anything by it because you’ve never read Derrida… Thanks Gobbo, I think that the actual philosophers can handle this thread from now on…
I haven’t read the article yet but what ws the argument against Derrida?
Poor philosophy? Gimmick? Obtuse? A hack?
I really should read some of Derrida philosophical literature…you always talk of him and I realise he is one of the Big Steaks in relation to ‘present’ philosophy and linguistics…
Kindly either explain your point or remove the 3 vacuous, ignorant posts from this thread and leave discussion of Derrida to people who actually know something about him. Otherwise you are just wasting time and space, as per usual…
I’ve been reading Derrida intensely for 4 years and am getting a lot of joy out of his later works where he is more openly concerned with ethics and politics. In fact I’m crudely basing some of the structures in the novel I’m currently writing on suggestions that Derrida made in various places. I can certainly suggest some excellent introductory essays and shorter commentaries, books that I unfortunately didn’t come across until I’d already read half a dozen of Derrida’s texts. It’s a passion for me, mainly because someone in this bloody country has to understand Derrida and you can’t really expect the philosophers in the universities to do it. Except in places like the University of Sussex or Manchester Met…
My favourite deconstructive moment was managing to comprehensively refute the basis of logic in language’s stability during a logic seminar. The department in which I was at that time studying had barely heard of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, let alone Derrida or Barthes. They were familiar with the later Wittgenstein but the tutor that I had clearly didn’t understand it. He kept describing it in Lockean terms about ideas held before the mind when Wittgenstein explicitly attacks such approaches…
The specific criticisms levelled against Derrida in the article:
This is of course not a criticism of Derrida but a criticism of other writers who perhaps gained extra notoriety due to the renewed interest in Criticism (with a capital C) that Derrida helped to fuel. As such it’s just vague and irrelevant.
Postmodern architecture has little to do with Derrida. It has more to do with the failure to appreciate Merleau-Ponty, but let’s not get into that…
Deconstruction is neither a breaking down nor an analysis, though deconstructionists sometimes do such things. This is more of a technical issue that you can’t really expect a journalist (who has never read Derrida but is obliged to write a piece about him) to know.
Now the article attacks a misappropriate of the term ‘deconstruction’, as though that were Derrida’s fault rather than simply a fact of language use. Existentialism, as we all know, did not emerge out of France after the Second World War, it had existed for at least a century prior to that. French Existentialism appeared at about the time of that war, true, but that’s only a small part of that bit of philosophy. Structuralism is a little harder to nail down, but most of it is based on Saussure who died in 1913.
The big irony for structuralists (who maintain that all texts are part of a the whole multiplicity of textuality) and deconstructionists (who maintain that a text is a polymorphous irreducible plurality, or put more simply, something that is never singular and is always in flux) is that Saussure’s key text (the Course in General Linguistics, a must-read for all wannabe Derridans) was compiled after his death. It is a mashing together of his notes and those of the students who attended his lectures.
Not least by the writer of this article…
This is a lengthy issue but the fact remains that regardless of De Man’s anti-Semitism he was a brilliant literary theoriest. For a deconstructionist (who doesn’t assume any necessary correlation between the author’s views on a given topic and the meaning to be taken from a text by that author) such criticisms are simply not relevant.
The article does continue, basically accusing Derrida of being a sham theorist, a shyster, a sophist (blahblahblah - you get the picture) but I can’t be bothered at this moment to keep on explaining why it’s wrong. Take 10 minutes to read it quickly and see what you make of it. It isn’t all that important, Someemofag asked me to post on this topic so I have, though I am enjoying the sound of my own voice on this particular topic.
Now that’s not to say that there aren’t criticisms to be made of Derrida’s work, not least his comments on Nietzsche. I’ve never come across an actual refutation, mind you, and plenty have taken a pop at him.
There’s a lot more to this story but I don’t have the time for more words at this point. Like I say, it’s a passion for me. I like a good story and I find Derrida’s story highly amusing. He overturned the applecart, though many are standing around with the apples rolling around their ankles denying that anything has changed. He’s like the madman in Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ exposition. Of course Derrida believed in God (in a sense) but that’s another story…
Fuck it, post whatever you like. If the limit of your knowledge is such that this is your best shot at making an interesting comment then so be it. No hard feelings…
