I think I've this dialogue before in some of the old Three Stooges shorts.

It's funny to see Derrida complaining of a lack of dialogue when, according to his theories, meaningful communication between people is fundamentally impossible. I've never understood why deconstructionists bother to write anything at all.

"I've never understood why deconstructionists bother to write anything at all."

So the rest of the world will be as depressed as they are.

Could Derrida's politics have been more predictable or cliched?

Peter Burnet, sometimes I really love your comments... this one made me bust out laughing after sloshing through the preceding verbosity. Thanks for the great perspective.

D.L.

Pleasure. Thanks.

...a garrulous and hypermediatized non-communication, a tremendous accumulation of wealth, means of production, teletechnologies...

Dude, what?

Must be using the random phrase generator.

Gideon: More likely something like this: The Postmodernism Generator.

Priceless.

Jacques Derrida -- "father of deconstruction and the patron saint of undeserved tenured faculty positions". . . is high on the list of 20th century writers (the terms "philosopher" and "thinker" would not be appropriate) who will not even be forgotten in the 22nd century.

The New York Times excellent obituary: Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74; By JONATHAN KANDELL; Published: October 10, 2004 is excerpted below:

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. . . 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. . . He twice failed his entrance exam to the École Normal Supérieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was finally admitted in 1952. . . For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure. . .

* * * * *

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. . . Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism was already passé in France. . . 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."

* * * * *

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. . .

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. . . 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.

* * * * *

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. . . 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."

================================================

The NYTimes obit caused some of the usual suspects to respond to the paper in the Letters on Wednesday:

"We will leave to others to decide whether your obituary is unmalicious. There can be no question, however, that it relieves readers of the burden of trying to understand Jacques Derrida and deconstruction."

They posted their reply and a full list of signers and supporters on web site.

A couple of notes:

1. The list is convenient. If the signers were exiled from the academy and taught to grapple with real questions such as: "would you like fries with that?", it would improve the quality of American education and save lots of money.

2. When they say that the NYTimes has relieved us of the burden of trying to understand Derrida and deconstruction. What they mean is that it is relieving us of the burden of learning the mummery of their mystical rites. The NYTimes article actually teaches us quite clearly who Derrida was and what deconstruction is.

3. Derrida was one of the truly pathetic, but unfortunately common, characters of the 20th century. The Jew lost in the cosmos. Uprooted from his people by Nazism and his land by the traumatic, but little known in America, Algerian war, Derrida sought to transform himself into the supreme avatar of humanity transformed by rational philosophy, the French intellectual. Derrida is not terribly different than others such as Hannah Arendt, who actually slept with Heidegger, or the odious Noam Chomsky who shills for holocaust deniers and terrorists.

4. Deconstruction is simply a thick paste of BS, whitewash and fog used to cover-up the responsibility of the intellectuals for being the choreographers and cheerleaders for every tyrant, thug and terrorist who has come down the pike since the beginning of the French Revolution.

Remarkably enough the memorial page linked above has a quote from Derrida's eulogy for the Nazi propagandist DeMan. Of course if you can swallow hard enough to eulogize Nazis, Stalinists and Islamo-nazis should come easy.

Robert--excellent.

Rick T. posted "I think I've this dialogue before in some of the old Three Stooges shorts." Perfectly understandable, but you're confusing Jacques Derrida with Joe "Curly Joe" DeRita, who was the only one of the Stooges to come from a show biz family., according to the official Three Stooges website. I always thought it was wildly funny that one of the most respected (and most dour and most humorless) philosophers of the 20th century shared the same name (at least phonetically) with a Stooge!

Robert: Isn't it as simple as the eternal conviction of the watchers that they are equal to (or better than) the doers?

To my mind, the truest passage written in English is Jane Austen's: Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to know what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began playing again. Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said to Darcy,

"Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss, if she practised more, and could have the advantage of a London master. She has a very good notion of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne's. Anne would have been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn."

Pride & Prejudice, Chapter VIII of Volume II (Chap. 31).

David:

That makes me think of the confident expertise and authority so many of the childless bring to childrearing.

It may be that simple, but it is a whole bunch sleazier.

Peter: Or the people at cocktail parties who tell clients that their case is a slam-dunk winner and the fees they're paying too high.

David: Yes, but in my experience most clients figure that out for themselves the instant the case is over.

Robert
Do you think that Hannah Arendt belongs in the same category? Didn't she spill the beans on the whole European intellectual racket with her book "On Totalitarianism"?

"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."

Such a self-important delusion reminds me of the subject of Flora Rheta Schreiber's book "The Shoemaker", which tells the true story of a psychotic killer. He was a shoemaker by trade, and during his descent into madness he developed the delusion that he could save mankind through foot orthodics. In his mind he imagined that all mankinds ills could be traced to misaligned foot and ankle bones caused by poor footwear. He actually carried out experiments on gerbils, making tiny little shoes for them.

It is healthy to take pride in one's profession, but you have to be truly imbalanced to imagine that your profession is the salvation of mankind. It is seductive thought, though.