| Topic: |
Science > Philosophy |
| User: |
"Robert Cohen" |
| Date: |
10 Oct 2004 08:03:39 AM |
| Object: |
de-constructionist derrida deceases |
copyrighted los angeles time 2004
www.latimes.com
October 10, 2004 E-mail story Print
OBITUARIES
Jacques Derrida, 74; Intellectual Founded Controversial Deconstruction Movement
Photos
Jacques Derrida
(Joel Robine / AFP)
On The Web
Jacques Derrida links
Times Headlines
Jacques Derrida, 74; Intellectual Founded Controversial Deconstructionists
By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
Jacques Derrida, the influential French thinker and writer who inspired
admiration, vilification and utter bewilderment as the founder of the
intellectual movement known as deconstruction, has died. He was 74.
Derrida died Friday at a Paris hospital of complications from pancreatic
cancer, French radio reported.
"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary
philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,"
French President Jacques Chirac said in a statement Saturday. "Through his
work, he sought to find the free movement which lies at the root of all
thinking."
Derrida, who divided his time between Paris and the United States, where he
lectured annually at UC Irvine and other universities, was perhaps the most
controversial and daring philosopher of the late 20th century.
He rocked the American academy in a 1966 speech that introduced deconstruction
to the United States as a mode of analysis that sought to turn Western
philosophy on its head.
Deconstruction gained a following on college campuses across the country, most
famously at Yale University in the 1970s and later at UC Irvine. A notoriously
difficult theory, it left an imprint on a number of fields, particularly
literature, where scholars seized on deconstruction as the basis for radical
reinterpretations of classic works of literature and philosophy. Gradually,
disciplines as disparate as business, architecture, law and religion showed the
influence of Derrida's ideas.
Although deconstruction's influence has waned, it even penetrated popular
culture, where the avant-garde in seemingly everything from couture to cuisine
has been described, rightly or wrongly, as "deconstructed."
"Of all the philosophers of our time," eminent Stanford University philosopher
Richard Rorty once said, Derrida "has been the most effective at doing what
Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking the crust of convention,
questioning assumptions never before doubted, raising issues never before
discussed."
His detractors were just as vociferous. Some labeled him a nihilist for his
subversion of traditional principles, while others charged him with deliberate
inscrutability.
John Searle, a Mills professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and one of
Derrida's most eloquent critics, once said that what he found most deplorable
about Derrida and deconstruction was "the low level of philosophical
argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated
claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by
making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be
silly or trivial."
Critics saw nothing silly about Derrida's defense in the late 1980s of Paul de
Man, a Yale professor and a leading American proponent of deconstruction who
had died earlier that decade. Derrida issued a 60-page essay supporting De Man
after reports that De Man, a native of Belgium, had written for a pro-Nazi
Belgian newspaper in the early 1940s. Derrida's critics seized on his defense
of De Man as evidence of deconstruction's apolitical and nihilistic nature.
In 1992, when Cambridge University proposed giving Derrida an honorary degree,
the anti-Derrideans on the faculty raised strenuous objections, pronouncing his
work "absurd," "disabling" and so perverse as to "make complete nonsense of
science, technology and medicine." Their dissent triggered the first full
faculty vote on an honorary degree in 30 years, but Derrida's supporters
prevailed, 336 to 204.
Stimulating, Stupefying
The father of deconstruction ....blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada (please see
the obit article at latimes.com)
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