“IN HIM
France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of
our times,” announced Jacques Chirac, the French president, on the day
after Jacques Derrida's death. Mr Derrida himself disagreed with pretty much
everything anyone said about him; but he may have let that encomium pass.
The inventor of “deconstruction”—an ill-defined habit of
dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions—was
indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities.There
has always been a market for obscurantism. Socrates railed against the followers
of Heraclitus of Ephesus for much the same reasons that Mr Derrida's critics
berate his unfortunate disciples: If you ask one of them a question, they
draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and
shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant,
you're transfixed by another novel set of metaphors.
You'll never get anywhere with any of them. Mr Derrida's father was a salesman
of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Born in a suburb of Algiers, Jacques was expelled
from his school at the age of 12 because of the Vichy government's racial
laws. With some difficulty, in 1952 he succeeded in entering the elite Ecole
Normale Supérieure in Paris and attended the lectures of Michel Foucault.
He began to lecture at the Ecole Normale in 1964. Two years later, at a conference
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he laid the foundations of his reputation
in America with a bold new way to approach literary texts and lay bare their
ideological presuppositions. Three books followed in 1967, including “Of
Grammatology” and “Writing and Difference”. A radical star
was born. Mr Derrida's style of deconstruction flowered especially in American
departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism,
feminism and anti-colonialism. Although by the early 1980s French academics
had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America's teachers of literature
increasingly embraced Mr Derrida. A
crisis came in 1987. The New York Times revealed that Paul de Man, a friend
of Mr Derrida's and one of America's leading deconstructionists, had written
anti-Semitic articles for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1940-42. Coincidentally,
also in 1987, evidence began to emerge of the hidden Nazi past of the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger,
who had been a major influence on Mr Derrida. Mr Derrida's response was disastrous.
He used deconstructionist techniques to defend the two men, laying down a
fog of convoluted rhetoric in a doomed attempt to exonerate them. This fed
straight into the hands of his critics, who had always argued that the playful
evasiveness of deconstruction masked its moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
The New York Review of Books quipped that deconstruction means never having
to say you're sorry.As his influence waned, his fame grew. Abandoning his
earlier reticence, he submitted to interviews and photographs. He confessed
to disliking Woody Allen's comedy, “Deconstructing Harry”. The
books continued to flow (80 volumes in all) as his concerns moved away from
literary and philosophical texts to ethical and political subjects, but they
were no easier to follow. In his final years he became increasingly concerned
with religion, and some theologians started to show interest in his work.
God help them.