Jacques Derrida RIP

Years ago I did an essay for an English course in which I illustrated the parallels between remix culture and the Deconstructionist movement.

So, thank you, Jacques.

i just saw the documentary the bbc article cites. good stuff.

shit

my prof told me a (kind of) funny story yesterday about Derrida. he was able to attend one of his classes in France, and that day one poor girl had to give a presentation, and she was so nervous to be giving a presentation to Derrida that she was chain smoking like a chimney the entire time.

i forgot to mention that my prof said he was very kind and considerate to that student giving the presentation.

More seriously: he was looking not all that well last time I saw him on the UCI campus. I was crossing the bridge back from the demi-shopping mall across from the admin building and passed by him -- he was looking less sprightly than before, more careworn and considered. A very elegant man every time I saw him around, though, and while at the time I was a student I was somewhat annoyed at the abject worship in the department (not universal, I'll admit), on balance he was one of the most creative folks in a field that too easily can extinguish or redirect that spark. RIP, indeed.

Barthes (1980); Lacan (1981); Aron (1983); Foucault (1984); Braudel (1985); Debord (1994); Deleuze (1995); Lyotard (1998); Bourdieu (2002). Derrida (2004).

Actually, that's not quite true. Levi-Strauss is still alive. He's 95. And I guess there's Virilio and Baudrillard left.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40160000/jpg/_40160454_derrida203bafp.jpg

Nice photo indeed, Ned. Derrida was a handsome man. BBC teletext is headlining the story 'Deconstruction icon Derrida dies'. You don't usually get to be an 'icon' unless you're someone people look at as well as read.

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/derrida.html

Yeah, he was a handsome man - I think French intellectuals tend to be, even if not in a strict sense, there is a certain sense of grandeur to to the way France treats it's thinkers. It's something I think more countries could learn from, but I guess there is little chance of our culture ever respecting intellectual creativity as much as it does wealth or physical beauty.

"No," he replies impishly, "only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully".

RIP

i wonder what he would think if i lit a candle for him.

One of the first people to spin my head around.

The Politics of Friendship says that the duty to mourn is consitutive of the very nature of friendship's contract, and I guess this is where it comes due. RIP

There were some rather cute and charming scenes in that documentary

my cynical stubborn side tells me I got to add : there are ideas and actions for longer, healthier lives

that documentary was good, very endearing. condolences to mrs. derrida.

Here's the thing -- I never got what was s'posed to be so "hard" or "abstruse" or whatever about deconstructionism. Is this a generational thing or what? The college classes I had where this came into play, it was kind of like, well duh.

I find somewhat a somewhat incredible statement. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Adornian, and I'll freely admit that Derrida's often confounded / confused / abstrusted me to absolute frustration.

'When your goal is to deconstruct rather than read — that is, to hunt down internal contradictions rather than to reconstruct what a text means — then you can set aside the logic of observation and inference and take up word play to show how... every previous critic's own political agenda lurks behind what he perceived as the plain meaning of the text.'

'...Deconstruction carries a distinct political advantage for the intellectual Left. When words no longer retain their common sense meanings, then any statement of truth becomes suspect. (Is Mark my first name?) What could be handier, if you can't make a reasonable case for what you believe, than a theory which seems to undermine reason itself and thereby relativizes all knowledge? Thus, for example, if you're a multiculturalist, you can argue — against historical evidence — that Greek philosophy is derived from sub-Saharan Africa; or if you're a feminist, you can argue — against biological evidence — that gender is entirely socially constructed; or if you're a Marxist, you can argue — against experiential evidence — that socialism is compatible with individual rights.'

This is of course a misleading argument. Deconstruction is not a way of turning water into whatever wine you want it to be, but a way of looking into how language generates meaning, and what power relationships exist in it. At the bottom of the article there's a telling little biographical tidbit:

'Mark Goldblatt's satire of black hip-hop culture, Africa Speaks, has just been released in paperback.'

Wow, just as well he's descredited those who 'take up word play to show how every previous critic's own political agenda lurks behind what he perceived as the plain meaning of the text.' Otherwise that harmless satire might look like it had a political agenda behind it, eh readers?

[Note to James Blount, should he happen by. No, I do not read the National Review. This may be the first time I've seen the magazine. I arrived at it by googling the Cambridge honorary degree debacle, when 20 philosophers accused Derrida of being more of a Dadaist than a philosopher, and tried to block the award.]

They then conclude of Derrida that 'where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial'. Which sounds like a really succinct paraphrase of deconstruction's critique of language itself!

Was he the drummer for Gay Dad as well?

But you see, by declaring Derrida dead, you are applying an objectivity to a view which is inherently subjective. Viz, death, which may in fact only be a simulated dis-reality (cf. Baudrillard); by increasing diminishment of conspicuous signifiers, one might be inclined to remediate the response of this "event" to transmeditate the meaning of postmodern proclivity towards perceptualism. Whereas Wittgensteinian ethics would postulate cultural concomity, perhaps this is only another transubstantive attempt at Lacanian digressive incunabulae as a means for hyperbolic Kincaidian fixations (see footnote 267). But on the subject of lapidary consensuality...

'Something about the way he read text made it almost seem like he could defy time, fixed meaning, and even death. Like he could have deconstructed death before it deconstructed him. Like he was the knight in 'The Seventh Seal', playing chess with the Reaper, and I really thought he might somehow have won.'

Oddly, one of the things that I said in response was roughly what JtN just said.

Pavane pour un philosophe defunt

Or

Dirge for Jacques Derrida

NJL

Derrida, oh Derrida, say have you met Derrida
Derrida the Deconstructionist.
His works, all told, form quite a pile,
But in a style completely vile.

Derrida, oh Derrida, that encyclo-pedi-yah
Derrida the world’s greatest fake!
The feminist scholar still on the make,
The cultural theorist whose job is at stake,
And the English professor who’s barely awake,
They can learn a lot from Derrida!

He’ll deconstruct, per your order, for a buck and a quarter
Whatever football game is on,
Or a building of Gehry, or superstring theory,
Or the memoirs of Jenna Jameson.

Derrida oh Derrida, say have you met Derrida,
Derrida the Deconstructionist.
When his brain cells start a-wheezin’,
Out the door goes western reason.

Derrida, oh Derrida, that encyclo-pedi-yah,
Derrida the world’s greatest fake!
You can deconstruct Plato inside and out,
Or Wittgenstein’s Ladder, or Cartesian Doubt.
You don’t have to know what you’re talking about!
You can learn a lot from Derrida.

Come along and learn what you want about differance,
(You needn’t have the price of a ticket on Air France).
Here’s linguistics (well sort of) a la Sassure,
Here’s Althusser’s wife being placed sur rasure.

Here is Martin Heidegger, a-heilin’ his “Heil!”
And there’s Paul de Mann, see him smilin’ his smile,
Watching the MLA fall for his ruses,
And here’s Jacques’s tedious list of excuses.

Derrida, oh Derrida, that encyclo-pedi-yah,
Derrida the world’s greatest fake!
He once swept the Yalies clear off their feet,
The quips from his lips made their hearts skip a beat,
But now the old boy’s really feelin’ the heat!
For they’ve gone and buried Derrida!

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-375883,0.html

People respond in different ways.

I think that I, personally, am finding Reeve's sadder, to me, than Derrida's.

Possible silver lining to the dark Derridean cloud: there is now a vacancy in the intellectual world that Barry Davies suddenly has the time to fill.

BOP on deconstruction and action - http://www.bopnews.com/archives/001880.html#1880

also this- http://www.nplusonemag.com/

The guardian and its derrida orbituary (via FT): http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1324160,00.html

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/

Cool that Samuel Delany's on there.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1328214,00.html

I didn't notice the Onion thing. I'll look again. It's funny, I'm guessing.

No, it's tiny, and obvious. Online Edition, of course.

*I mean, fuck, for years you had Hilton Kramer devoting a regular column in the NY Post to do nothing but bray his ass off about how horrible the NYT was. Hilton Kramer!

Maybe when Donna Summer dies you'll hear some snide grumbling from the edges of rock discourse, but on the whole, if a disco pioneer died, Roger Rockist wouldn't even take notice.

"Advances in neuroscience upended Freudian assumptions about the brain, and psychoactive drugs replaced psychoanalysis"

"When a student in the audience asked the panelists, more than two dozen distinguished scholars, what theory was good for, the answer came back amid much hand-wringing over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq: very little."

Please.

Nice to see Drew Daniel contributing here! (I'm assuming it's the Matmos / Soft Pink Truth one)!

i miss u boo

"word"

im reading "acts of religion" and i almost cant put it down. the best essay in it, "force of law," is sort of terrifyingly good--the best kind of critique, where the essay is both a comment on and a movement past the text w/ which it concerns itself. a good 2/3ds of the whole thing is qualification and prolegomena and it still offers more up for thought than whole volumes by other philosophes.

he also has a reputation as very well-dressed, too

well, as having been very well-dressed

o max

what a fitting way for it to end, in death
-- cozen (Cozen), Monday, July 18, 2005 4:58 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

^^^this

I guess there's Virilio and Baudrillard left.

-- Momus (Momus), Saturday, October 9, 2004 4:32 PM

;_;

i guess there's momus and BIG HOOS left.

I'm still curious as to the source of your hatred for Cultural Studies students. Were you inundated with freshly minted Deconstructionist-wannabes spouting nonsense during Uni or what?

"Cultural Studies"

His term, not mine.

Well ok, his and lots of others that use it, but not mine.

um yeah do your fucking homework guys, no need for scare quotes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies

but yeah i'm generally talking about the colonization of the field by linguistic structuralism in the 70s and 80s rather than that.