Jacques Derrida, Dies at 74

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October 10, 2004
NY Times
Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74
By JONATHAN KANDELL

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.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French television,
The Associated Press reported.

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.

A Code Word for Discourse

Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word of
intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism - two other
fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from France after World
War II - had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his followers were unwilling -
some say unable - to define deconstruction with any precision, so it has
remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways.

Typical of Mr. Derrida's murky explanations of his philosophy was a 1993
paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York,
which began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is
such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various aspects
of deconstruction were no more easily accessible. Even some of their titles
- "Of Grammatology," "The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond," and
"Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" - could be off-putting to the
uninitiated.

"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.

Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul
de Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed exponent of
deconstruction in the United States. Four years after Mr. de Man's death, it
was revealed that he had contributed numerous pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic
articles to a newspaper in Belgium, where he was born, while it was under
German occupation during World War II. In defending his dead colleague, Mr.
Derrida, a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's
anti-Semitism.

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 right of passage into the world of
rebellious intellect.

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His father
was a salesman. At age 12, he was expelled from his French school when the
rector, adhering to the Vichy government's racial laws, ordered a drastic
cut in Jewish enrollment. Even as a teenager, Mr. Derrida (the name is
pronounced day-ree-DAH) was a voracious reader whose eclectic interests
embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche,
Albert Camus, and the poet Paul Valery.

But he could be an indifferent student. He failed his baccalaureate in his
first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the Ecole Normal
Superieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was
finally admitted in 1952. There he failed the oral portion of his final
exams on his first attempt. After graduation in 1956, he studied briefly at
Harvard University. For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and
logic at both the University of Paris and the Ecole Normal Superieure. Yet
he did not defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years
old.

By the early 1960's, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a rising
young intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language and
philosophy in leading academic journals. He was especially influenced by the
German philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Both were strong
critics of traditional metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which explored
the basis and perception of reality.

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. For many years,
he declined to be photographed for publication. He cut a dashing, handsome
figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair,
tanned complexion, and well-tailored suits. He peppered his lectures with
puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like, "Thinking is what we
already know that we have not yet begun," or, "Oh my friends, there is no
friend…"

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 Levi-Strauss, who studied societies through their
linguistic structure.

Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism
was already passe in France, and that Mr. Levi-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."

Other critics found it disturbing that obscure academics could presume to
denigrate a Sophocles, Voltaire or Tolstoy by seeking out cultural biases
and inexact language in their masterpieces. "Literature, the
deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong
people for entirely the wrong reasons," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, a British
novelist and professor, in a 1991 article for The New York Times Book
Review.

Mr. Derrida's influence was especially strong in the Yale University
literature department, where one of his close friends, a Belgian-born
professor, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champion of deconstruction in
literary analysis. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from war-torn
Europe, and even left the impression among colleagues that he had joined the
Belgian resistance.

But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man's death, research revealed that he
had written over 170 articles in the early 1940's for Le Soir, a Nazi
newspaper in Belgium. Some of these articles were openly anti-Semitic,
including one that echoed Nazi calls for "a final solution" and seemed to
defend the notion of concentration camps.

"A solution to the Jewish problem that aimed at the creation of a Jewish
colony isolated from Europe would entail no deplorable consequences for the
literary life of the West," wrote Mr. de Man.

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the
late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some former
colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit
deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr.
Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even using
literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the
Belgian scholar's newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic.

"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.

Lifting a Mysterious Aura

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.

Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He sat still for
photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly mysterious aura
to reveal the mundane details of his personal life.

A former Yale student, Amy Ziering Kofman, focused on him in a 2002
documentary, "Derrida," that some reviewers found charming. "With his unruly
white hair and hawklike face, Derrida is a compelling presence even when he
is merely pondering a question," wrote Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles
Times. "Even his off-the-cuff comments are intriguing, because everything
gets serious consideration. And when he is wary, he's never difficult for
its own sake but because his philosophical positions make him that way."

Rather than hang around the Left Bank cafes traditionally inhabited by
French intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a
suburb south of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his wife,
Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst. The couple had two sons, Pierre and
Jean. He also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy
teacher who later married the French political leader Lionel Jospin.

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional
soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television,
watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm
watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time."

Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, what
deconstruction was. "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about
difficulty?" he replied, frostily, to Dinitia Smith, a Times reporter, in a
1998. "Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why
are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand
enough to understand more."

Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, Mr.
Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which
will leave me unsatisfied."

Copyright 2004