"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time," 
Posted on 10/09/2004 5:16:26 PM PDT by El Conservador
PARIS - World-renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, a charismatic philosopher who founded the school known as deconstructionism, has died, the French president's office said Saturday. He was 74.
Derrida died at a Paris hospital of pancreatic cancer, French media reported, quoting friends and admirers.
The snowy-haired French intellectual taught, and thought, on both sides of the Atlantic, and his works were translated around the world.
Provocative and as difficult to define as his favorite subject — deconstruction — Derrida was a leading intellectual for decades. He is considered the modern-day French thinker best known internationally.
"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time," President Jacques Chirac said in a statement, calling Derrida a "citizen of the world."
Born to a Jewish family on July 15, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria, then part of France, Derrida wrote hundreds of books and essays. His reputation was launched with two 1967 publications in which he laid out basic ideas, "Writing and Difference" and "Of Grammatology." Among other works were the 1972 "Margins of Philosophy" and, more recently, "Specters of Marx" (1993).
Derrida was known as the father of deconstructionism, a branch of critical thought or analysis developed in the late 1960s and applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.
Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning.
Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida's philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to western values.
The deconstructionist approach has remained controversial, with detractors even proclaiming the movement dead. So divisive were Derrida's ideas that Cambridge University's plan to award him an honorary degree in 1992 was forced to a vote which he won.
Critics accused Derrida of nihilism, which he adamantly denied.
"Deconstruction is on the side of 'yes,' an affirmation of life," Derrida said in an August interview with the daily Le Monde.
Former Culture Minister Jack Lang, who knew Derrida, praised his "absolute originality" as well as his combative spirit.
"I knew he was ill, and at the same time, I saw him as so combative, so creative, so present, that I thought he would surmount his illness," Lang said on France-Info radio.
Derrida was often named — but never chosen — for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 1949, Derrida left Algeria for Paris to further his education, receiving an advanced degree in philosophy from the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in 1956. He later taught philosophy at the Sorbonne University from 1960-64 and at the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales from 1984-99.
He also taught in the United States, at the University of California at Irvine and at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities.
Despite his esoteric path, Derrida said in several interviews that he really wanted to be a soccer player but wasn't talented enough.
He refused to confine himself to an intellectual ivory tower, fighting for such things as the rights of Algerian immigrants in France and against apartheid in South Africa.
French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres called Derrida "profoundly humanist," saying the philosopher spent his final years working for the "values of hospitality," particularly between Europe and the Mediterranean.
"He wanted to build an open idea of Europe," a ministry statement said.
As Derrida grew ill, death haunted him. In a Le Monde interview in August, Derrida said that learning to live means learning to die.
"Less and less, I have not learned to accept death," he was quoted as saying. "I remain uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die."
Now the maggots and worms will deconstruct him.
This jackass basically thought that the ideals of Western Culture were not worthy of defense.
"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,"
Sounds to me like he got "deconstructed".
Derrida is dead? Or is he? How can we be certain?
O, and the French are a bunch of prissy cowards, also.
Of course it did... he was a humanist/athiest who was enthralled with his own clever ability to deride and ridicule the ideals of others.
What shock awaits the man when final breath,
Finds unprepared a soul to meet its death....
Did he go down clockwise, or counterclockwise?
Whether he is dead or not is just a matter of your point of view, isn't it?
A jew who fought for the rights of Algerian immigrants...
bet those algerian moslem immigrant friends of his would be deconstructing his grave right now if they had the chance, Idiot.
Only by birth.
This "philosopher" was only beholden to his own sense of purpose.
He considered the religious to be unworthy fools.
I'm GLAD he was scared shitless at the end. It was a most deserved fate.
I'm curious as to where he'll be "laid to rest."
Anything else I wish to say would be removed by the Mods.
Just another dead French nihilist .... plenty of them to be had.
Yeah, seriously - his philosophy stands (fails to stand, really) in such sharp opposition to the principles of Judaism, one cannot consider him to be a Jew in any meaningful sense.
Hahaha! Beautiful!
I'm sure the sexual and racial proletariat will show up and demand to know if death is a linguistic construct. :)
His philosophy has done great harm all through academia. You can't blame him singlehandedly, because all those other people had to have been drawn to pessimism, disillusion, and nihilism. But it's a sad business. It has pretty well wrecked the country's English departments.
Derrida taught a course at NYU for many years, and I met him at a reception. Everyone was fawning all over him. I found him impossible to talk to.
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