Derrida dead; consumed by cancer
The daddy of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, has died. Read all about it in a lengthy obituary by Jonathan Kandell in The New York Times. Sample graf:
"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."
Rainy Day clashed with Derrida last year after he co-signed an essay with the German thinker J?Habermas, which was published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. The two philosophers were responding to the "Letter of Eight," in which eight European countries, led by Great Britain and Spain, declared their support for the U.S. position on Iraq. Derrida and Habermas said that the European demonstrations against the war would go down in history as a "signal for the birth of a European public."
"We should not forget two dates. Not the day on which the newspapers communicated to their dumbfounded readers the oath of loyalty to Bush that the Spanish prime minister had extended to the pro-war European governments behind the backs of their EU colleagues; but just as little so February 15, 2003, when the demonstrating masses in London and Rome, Madrid and Barcelona, Berlin and Paris reacted to this coup."
We were suspicious of the "demonstrating masses" here at the time and their thundering silence on the genocide in Darfur this year has confirmed our initial skepticism. But that's all water under bridge. We are admonished to avoid speaking ill of the dead, so we'll leave Derrida with this wonderful little story by Michael Martone, a leading figure in the Johns Hopkins creative writing program during the 1960s. In a reflective piece about Baltimore and literary history, he included this gem titled "Derrida Consumed by Crabs":
1966. Derrida arrives in Baltimore, twenty-nine city blocks north of where we are now, to deliver, for the first time on these shores, the obituary of the author. At the very moment the construction of authorship in America is evolving from the romantic individual genius to the romantic individual genius with tenure. Later, Derrida is taken to a crab house on Belair Road where he is instructed in the procedure for disassembling the steamed Maryland blue crab. He is a quick study. He becomes proficient at removing the carapace, the feathery lungs and mustard some consider a delicacy, adept at cracking the claws with knife and wooden mallet, extracting the lump meat from the compartments of cartilage. The flesh of the crab is like soap. The act of consuming consumes him."
Marvellous. "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible," as Derrida said himself. So long, Jacques. Adieu.
