Jacques Derrida, the writer of deconstruction, died last night. I did not know that he suffered from pancreatic cancer. He was 74 years old.
How does one speak of Derrida? For to place him in a privileged position would be to do him a disservice. His writing and speaking (and his writing of speaking) was preoccupied with the positions of privilege. Consequently, I don't think that he would want to be remembered as an authority.
Of course, as logocentric readers and people, we couldn't help but privilege him. He was a French philosopher, after all. Toward the end of his life, he was probably over published; when you are recognized as a powerful and significant intellectual force, you can get paid for saying almost anything. Nevertheless, he never stopped thinking and writing, and I respect him for that. And some very interesting texts emerged from his later writing. Derrida was fascinated with religion and his own relationship with his Jewish heritage, and he recently published a collection of essays on faith as a place of beginnings, an epistemological movement that cannot be fully contained by epistemology.
I regret that I was never able to meet Derrida. (Even now, I am privileging him!) But perhaps I am not privileging him as much as I think. For when I think of Derrida, I don't think of an powerful philosopher. Instead, I think of a man who wrestled his entire life with what it means to be human, which is to say, what does it mean to be an inheritor of language and culture and memory? Is this meaning ever completely settled, fixed, total, beyond question and discourse? Does it mean to be human, or is being human what causes us to mean? He was not a privileged person; he was simply a person.
And, in one very real way, perhaps that is all we can say about any of us.
Wow, Derrida is dead. geez. That's unbelievable. I like your thoughts on it all Paul.
Posted by: JosiahQ at October 10, 2004 12:59 PMI felt really proud to be alive at the same time as Derrida--he was such a giant. What struck me the most in his continued critique of language was his vision for deconstruction to provoke a new discourse. I think that it was Eagleton who suggested that Deconstruction, the school of literary criticism, has toppled one theory after another without ever having to offer an actual methodology of its own. Well, I agree, but then again I feel that the beauty of deconstruction is its capacity to form new ways of discourse that are not readily defined. In Derrida's words, "deconstruction should provoke not only a questioning of the authority of some models of composition, but also a new way of writing, of composing...."
Posted by: Aaron at October 10, 2004 03:32 PMI read my first-year students excerpts from Derrida's obituary this morning and was met with a respectful silence but completely blank stares. I didn't expect them to know who he was, or why he was important. At the same time, I was struck with the thought that the class I am teaching is tremendously influenced by the wake of deconstructionism -- the understanding of the fluidity and situatedness of any discourse, including academic, is emphasized here at the UW and the students are writing from that emphasis.
I think that will, ultimately, be Derrida's fate as a intellectual. While controversial and criticized, his ideas have snuck into our writing and thinking in an undeniable and powerful way.