Just to mark his passing...
On a personal side, I considered the dude something of a dyslexic nightmare. I've read more than Grammatology, but mostly just articles beyond that, not whole books. I killed 5 yellow highlighters on Grammatology, which I used to hold the lines down as I read them, so my eyeballs wouldn't jump lines. With Derrida, my dyslexic eyeballs could read part of one line and part of another line and not even notice I'd done it (I have the same problem with number two pencil GREs and SATs and all that rot too. I used to have to erase whole columns of little dots).
My dissertation advisor once claimed Derrida was a patron saint of hypertext, an idea I disagreed with most vehemently.
When you study hypertext theory, you come to understand that nonlinearity is built on lexias, or chunking, so that texts can be broken up into branching structures, or to provide openings for dialogue (damn those spammers for clogging my comments fields on all my blogs).
Now oddly enough, with a guy like Mikhail Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination), you can pick the book up, put it down, jump around, read it out of sequence, and still understand the book and the man's ideas.
But not Derrida. NOT hypertextual, and NOT nonlinear, at least I don't think. Perhaps he likes a tangent, likes parallelism, circular structures, but his ideas DO NOT lend themselves to chunking lexias with points of entry for branching structures or for dialogue and commentary. Rather, they are the opposite... what I call "hyper-extended linearity." One massive monologue, like a bad dinner guest holding forth.
In short, you must stick with Derrida on the convoluted stretched-out Silly Putty strands. You can't pick him up and put him down. And defacing and arguing in the margins (which is how this dyslexic got through grad school) is especially difficult. (Besides, self consciously posed difficulty is elitist, she whispered quietly to no one listening, especially not ol' Thomas Sterns Eliot from his pages of Tradition and the Individual Talent)
Anyway, here are some interesting bits from the NYTimes Obit.
The New York Times > Obituaries > Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74
By JONATHAN KANDELL
Published: October 10, 2004
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
"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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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."
[...]
"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.
[...]
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.
So here endeth Derrida. And the question I would pose for you today (so sorry about the comments field turned off... you'll have to answer in your head to your own self) is this:
Is is possible deconstructionism is in NET EFFECT a conservative, right-wing intellectual movement (not an oxymoron, really it's not, just perhaps rare to find a conservative postmodernist), rather than a movement of rebellious turks bent on change and intellectual disruption?
Why would I suggest such a thing? Because when every premise breaks down, stasis is the result... no change. No change=conservatism, correct?
Some argue that deconstructionism disables action, defangs and renders ineffective rhetoricial arguments, arguments, for instance, that could refute the positions of politicians in a presidential election.
How many well-trained academics are making devastatingly deconstructionist arguments on behalf of a candidate for president, persuading and convincing audiences by the thousands with their wisdom and erudite reasoning?
I thought so.
Chris
This one just about wrote itself. It is probably one of my favorites of the series of Buzz Factor columns so far. Former students will recognize the topic as part of the semester-opening unit of all my freshmen comp classes at Clemson, along with the showing of the film Blade Runner. I always made my kids write their first paper on this topic, so I thought I might write a paper on the topic too. This is even about the right length for a first-year composition paper.
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