Derrida, the renowned philosopher and one of the rogues who is partly responsible for screwing up my nice little analytical philosophical world, just died today. The BBC article on his death begins the third paragraph with, “Fellow academics have charged that Derrida’s writings are ‘absurd’ but his mark on modern thinking is undisputed…” The NYT concludes that his “approach was controversial.” I wonder if it might be more accurate to say, “His approach has been hijacked and used by everyone in amazingly diverse ways and his challenges to the field of philosophy, the practice of reading, and the art of writing have contributed to a veritable civil war in the humanities which continues today.”
I like how the BBC article quotes him in a documentary made about him:
At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”
“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.
All of these articles refer to him founding a “school” of “deconstructionists”? Is this true? I know his work, which include the idea of deconstruction, has been amazingly influential, but are there people out there who call themselves “deconstructionists” and does anyone in literature or theory think there is a school which thinks it is “doing what Derrida does”?
Anyways, it was strange to hear this news today since I just started Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida which is the first time these two very different philosophers have agreed to be published together. I don’t know that much about Derrida’s work. I never made it through Spivak’s introduction to his On Grammatology. However, I really liked the book Derrida by Christopher Norris, all of whose work I really respect, and also Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, which I think does a decent job of explaining the idea.
UPDATE: There is a longer obituary in the NYT I didn’t see earlier. I like one quote especially:
“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.
UPDATE: Enowing has a nice entry on this, which points to an article at the Chronicle which doesn’t refer to the “deconstructionism” that I puzzled over above. Also enowing has a great quote which cracked me up:
Avital Ronell recalls being with Derrida when a new edition of a French dictionary is released, and it includes the word differance with an a. Avital wants to organize a celebration of this historic occasion. Derrida’s mom, who’s been sitting at the dinner table listening to this conversation, turns to Derrida aghast and asks, “Jacky, you spelt differance with an a?”
