Hey, what could be more natural than critical criticism? Yet that is exactly what all the third rate minds lacked as they blindly aped his methodology through these decades and gave us “deconstructive readings” of everything from Donne’s poetry to the Statue of Liberty, being critical of course of everything in the world except the methodology. By the way, for all those still star-struck by Derrida and his pseudo philosophy, deconstruction is NOT a synonym for analysis, though if the uncritical critics have anything to say, it will be before the next dictionary is issued.

Speaking of uncritical critics, who was it that wanted to canonize Derrida as a saint? I remember reading that someone seriously had some intention of doing this. Or did they lose interest as they chased the next figure in the endless parade of fashionable intellectual nonsense that has become the humanities since the 1960s? And, as that parade is still going through town, did anyone ever notice what happened to rigor?

I appreciate scholars like Derrida. They have very little else to do with their time– resulting (if anything can result, let’s say they are somehow convinced of the following) from social ineptitude, or lack of beauty, or childhood trauma, or etc.– and, in turn, they perform the academic dirt work of accumulating various good ideas (usually not a single original among them) of more original men and women and attempt to distill. However, more often than not they are misinterpreting the original idea– for self-serving reasons, or in an attempt to delude the people, or more often themselves, that this misinterpretation makes the idea original. You can top a house with sand instead of a roof, no doubt, but let’s hope the weather cooperates and that the structure will hold. A house is not built to be topped with sand, you can build one that is but you need to either
a) find someone willing or someone who has
b) do it yourself

Attempting to reconcile whether Derrida was anti-west and holding this against him is foolish. If he was not anti-west, then the man was the master’s poodle. Any scholar who is pro-west likes their paycheck and lives in lala-land. Have some intellectual responsibility and integrity, please!

I also am ashamed to see the comparative scales of philosophers applied. Not as great as Wittgenstein? What does that mean? Do we know that? And what if he isn’t? Are YOU as “great” as Derrida, much less Wittgenstein? For those of us tilling in the academic soil and not issuing orders from the manor house, we should be careful scoffing at a very significant figure for not being as “great” as another figure.

sure, he had interesting things to say, but he thought everything he said was profound. maybe he gave academia a new toy to play with, but the collective emitted a deep sigh.

you can’t argue with his acceptance, but you can make moot his entire “philosophy” quite easily.

Again, it would be foolish to argue Derrida’s work has no value whatsoever. But even a passing acquaintance with it reveals that it is hardly flawlessly sublime.

As for students like debbieg who (wow) say the D. man really got them, you know, thinking: sip on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and you’ll get some experience in thinking about language and meaning, and your prose style will be protected from Derridean infection. Better yet read more literature.

That one would take Derrida at his word is not surprising: he was the Pied Piper of his generation.

The commoditized version of “deconstruction” that I had the severe displeasure of enduring was a facile ego boost for the disciples who espoused it with near religious fervour. How convenient to be told that authors never actually mean what they write, that they are unaware of their ignorance and that it is only by “deconstructing” their texts (led, of course, by the professor who DOES know what these ignorant authors REALLY meant) that we can arrive at their “true” meaning. The implications for history were alarming if this particular “perspective” held any validity. Peter Novick in “That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession” provides a compelling illustration of the absurdities that resulted in some quarters when “deconstruction” was recklessly applied as an analytical tool.

Of course, it is not fair to hold Derrida accountable for all the excesses carried out in the name of the approach he championed, but, in my field, any benefits of a proper application of his approach were outweighed by the distortions inflicted by grosser applications. And frankly, attempts to defend Derrida and deconstruction by, essentially, claiming that critics simply lack sufficient intelligence to “understand the master and his methods” (said master and methods are so infallible, of course, that anyone who does understand them cannot help but see their infallibility) is risible.

(P.S. I hereby assert that I actually do both understand and mean exactly what I’ve written in this post)

There’s an easy test for truth. Take a coin, and flip it. The result, be it a head or a tail, is unequivocably objective, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a postmodernist or a damned liar – but most probably both. Derrida adds nothing to our understanding of the human condition; like so many others, it is not so much that he should be banned as that he is a miserable waste of time.

Personally I find Derrida unduly surprised that surrounding Being lies NonBeing, but his work delights nonetheless. And I am delighted to possess a Jacques Derrida autograph, right next to a baseball autographed by the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates.

If Derrida sins, his sin lies in pursuing a thought other than the thought that has to be thought. This sin leaves him a “major minor” among modern philosophers, and if two and a half decades took him to be something more than that, the fault lies more in the idolators than than the idol.

May his name be erased. May he be utterly forgotten.

It seems like old hat after Heidegger and Nietzsche, but it isn’t trivial. If you accept this position on ethics, then the remaining philosophical alternative will look something like Badiou: enshrining mathematics as ontology to provide background justification for permanent revolution. Given the difficulty of founding an ethics on skepticism, and the stakes involved, it is hardly surprising that Derrida failed to arrive at anything definitive.

Like some others, I’m a bit puzzled by the importance accorded to Derrida’s relation Levinas here. Would be nice to get some clarification.

BTW: A lot of people seem to resent Derrida for creating befuddlement. But skepticism requires abandoning all of the illusions created by our enslavement to language — one needs a Guide to Becoming Perplexed, or else one goes through life confusing everything without becoming aware of one’s confusion. Deconstruction may have led the way down a few rabbit holes, but you have to give some credit for developing a method of thinking which deals with the confusion adn error conditioned by our dependence on language.

But Look! It’s Tablet Magazine: A New Read on Jewish Life. And there you find an aricle that reviews a book that at the end glorifies Levinas and points an angry patriarchal finger at the vague ‘Wandering Jew’ who just won’t pin it down…predictable, right?

“Deconstruction, which produces itself first of all as the deconstruction of these oppositions, therefore immediately concerns, just as much and just as radically, the institutional structures founded on such oppositions.” (Gutek, quoting Jacques Derrida, p. 138).

Can anyone pleas tell me what that means???