Free Republic

The ultra-progressive New School university is facing a projected $85.5 million budget deficit — and things are so bad that even asked students and faculty have been asked to submit budget-cutting suggestions. In no surprise for a school that’s produced Marxists and progressives such as Jacques Derrida and Erich Fromm, the ideas include chopping executive salaries and even selling off the school-owned Greenwich Village townhouse currently occupied by former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, now serving as New School’s interim president. The New School woke up to a harsh reality during the pandemic: operating a private university in lower Manhattan...

Jordan Peterson, Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, speaks with The Epoch Times about Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism. Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people, yet its crimes have not been fully compiled and its ideology still persists. The Epoch Times seeks to expose the history and beliefs of this movement, which has been a source of tyranny and destruction since it emerged.

The culture war might be likened to fighting a war against a coalition of powers. Imagine WWI-style trench warfare on a long front. In the center of the enemy lines are the forces of moral relativism. These forces oppose the idea that there is a universal moral law. On one flank are the forces of the sexual revolution, including gays, feminists, adulterers, the promiscuous, and the pro-abortion folks. On the other flank are the cultural relativists, and multiculturalists. This camp opposes the ideas of truth, beauty, and intrinsic quality. It seeks to suppress the literary, philosophical, and artistic heritage of...

The talking heads continue to yap about the source of the savagery driving Jared Lee Loughner. Many on the left have tried, and failed, to pin the blame for the Tucson massacre on the Tea Parties or, just as ridiculous, on Sarah Palin. Meanwhile, the 900-pound gorilla in the interrogation room remains unquestioned and unchallenged. Its name is "deconstructionism." Deconstructionism is historical relativism on crack cocaine. The "theory" is being freely and openly distributed to almost every college student in America. Courses in most of the humanities typically include the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In fact, it...

As readers of this space know, we frequently subject academics to what we view as constructive criticism. As travelers through the blogosphere may have noticed, they sometimes answer those critiques. “Someone named Candace de Russy (on the usually unbearably dreadful National Review blog on the university situation 'Phi Beta Cons') cites someone else named Laura Ventura at Accuracy in Academia to the effect that the fact that the journal Critical Inquiry has more citations of Derrida and Marx than of C. S. Lewis and Thomas Jefferson is an indication of the journal’s ‘anti-American, anti-war, and anti-Christian’ stance,” Bucknell sociologist Alexander...

Relative thinking The death of Jacques Derrida prompted a flood of barbed jokes and criticism of the so-called "anything goes" branch of philosophical thought with which he was most closely identified. What is it about relativism that gets us so hot under the collar? Richard Lea investigatesThursday November 18, 2004 Jacques Derrida: deep thinker or truth thief? An announcement from president Jacques Chirac, an attack in the New York Times, a series of puzzled obituaries and a torrent of jokes about deconstructing mortality. "Naturally the coverage of Derrida's death was mixed," says AC Grayling, reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College,...

A headline for an obituary in the October 10 New York Times said it all: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.” There is no denying the “abstruse” part. The French philosopher’s work was not just difficult to understand; it was incomprehensible. Yet, for all of Derrida’s murky and jargon-ridden prose, his impact on the world we live in was enormous. Derrida, you see, was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.”...

The protagonist of Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal work "Thus Spake Zarathustra" declares, "God is dead." But it was God, or at least nature, that had the final say in the matter. A clever epigram puts the issue in stark relief. Nietzsche: "God is dead." God: "Nietzsche is dead." Nietzsche predicted that the decline in traditional beliefs, such as the belief in God, would undermine the cultural foundations of morality and set mankind on an inevitable journey toward relativism and nihilism. After Nietzsche's death, one of the great captains of that journey was Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-born French philosopher whose signal contribution...

Derrida’s Bluff By Christopher Orlet Published 10/15/2004 12:04:18 AM The most charming and practical thing about the obituary is that the writer has at most a thousand words to sum up the life of the deceased. He must be concise. This fact provided especial relief when the French philosopher Jacques Derrida died this week. Most of us, I'll wager, have heard of Derrida, some of us even had heard of his brainchild deconstruction theory, but few of us could have said what all the fuss was about. Even in death Doc Derrida continued to baffle and confuse, in particular the...

NEITHER George W. Bush nor Tony Blair comes across as a particularly philosophical figure. Mr Bush clearly does have an established body of political principles, but obviously finds it difficult to articulate abstract themes. Mr Blair, it might be said, is in the opposite position. There is, nevertheless, a challenging conceptual question for both men this morning. Who best understands the implications of the Australian general election: John Howard, elected for a fourth term on Saturday, or Jacques Derrida, the French intellectual whose death was sombrely announced as the votes Down Under were being counted? There is not much doubt...

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced. He was 74. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness,...

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...

Jacques Derrida a website Voyage ends at age 74

In his new book, Intellectual Morons, Daniel Flynn exposes the dangers of blindly following intellectual elites who support and promote idiotic ideas and theories. Chris Banescu, who recently wrote the review of the book, interviewed Flynn about the origins of the material and the impact its revelations will have on our culture. Chris Banescu: What inspired you to write this book? Daniel Flynn: My goal in writing Intellectual Morons is to get more people to think with their brain rather than their ideology. By exposing ideologically-inspired hoaxes and frauds, the book not only rebuts falsehood but helps immunize readers against...

THE POST-MODERNIST FOOLS AMONG US -- Falstaffs At The Gates... A grand new production of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 has come to New York. Condensed into one four-hour performance, it has been received with favorable reviews, and Kevin Kline's performance as Sir John Falstaff is itself worth the price of admission: (On the battlefield of Shrewsbury) PRINCE HAL: Why, thou owest God a death. (exits) FALSTAFF: 'Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day -what need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter, honour...

Tolerance: The Enlightenment Vs Multi-Culturalism. By Robert Wolf Tolerance, as exemplified by the Enlightenment ‘philosophes’, incorporated the belief that each individual should be free to pursue his own interests. In the words of Locke, “The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body (recreation); and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.1 Unlike Hobbes’ Leviathan’, Locke regards this contract as revocable, a government that depends upon the consent...

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale,...