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...Derrida... was... one of the most famous intellectuals of the past 40 years. His celebrity rivaled that of Jean-Paul Sartre. As the founder, honorary CEO and chief publicist for an abstruse philosophical doctrine he called "deconstruction," Mr. Derrida was celebrated and vilified in about equal measure.... What is deconstruction? ...[D]econstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible.... the view that the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and that, at bottom, reality is unknowable. [I]f you dress up the idea in a forbidding vocabulary, full of neologisms and recondite references to philosophy, then you...

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...

Camus as Conservative: A post 9/11 reassessment of the work of Albert Camus Murray Soupcoff The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of...

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,...