Jacques Derrida was a thinker of many facets

* Jacques Derrida was a thinker of many facets. His method of analysis, known as "deconstruction," could be seen, on a narrow view, as a close reading of texts with the aim of analyzing ambiguities and seeming contradictions, issuing sometimes in the conclusion that important texts--all texts perhaps--are meaningless.

At a more radical reach, the Derridean view could be seen as a fundamental assault on rationality and civilization. From an entirely different perspective, Derrida could be seen as merely a liberal, casting a liberating doubt upon absolutes. Probably American academics took all of this with undue seriousness, there being a distinctively Parisian intellectuality about it: ideas as clever games, intellectual pate de foie gras. (One remembers that Burke, on his first visit to Paris, was annoyed by the frivolity of the philosophes he met. Of course they did not believe many of the things they said, the pleasure being in the saying of them.) Nonetheless, Derrida belonged to a group of French philosophers, or anti-philosophers--Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan--whose principal effect was to destroy the teaching of literature in American universities. Students, wanting to discuss novels and poems, heard instead about "theory," often expounded in impenetrable and hieratic language. Classrooms, justifiably, emptied. A road-to-Damascus defection from theory by Frank Lentricchia of Duke proved a harbinger, as he realized that, by God, he had gotten into this field because he enjoyed works of ... literature; with joy he returned to poems and novels and other actual works. The cloud of theory now has passed, a curious interlude. M. Derrida has died in Paris at 74, warmly remembered by friends on both sides of the Atlantic. R.I.P.

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