Jacques Derrida

Anabell Guerrero Mendez / Opale

“IN HIM France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our times,” announced Jacques Chirac, the French president, on the day after Jacques Derrida's death. Mr Derrida himself disagreed with pretty much everything anyone said about him; but he may have let that encomium pass. The inventor of “deconstruction”—an ill-defined habit of dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions—was indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities.

He was also the most controversial. In 1992 a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University caused such howls that the university was forced to put the matter to a ballot—the first time this had happened in 30 years. Amid charges that Mr Derrida's work was absurd, vapid and pernicious, the degree was awarded in the end, by 336 votes to 204.

The academy is often fractious, but this was different. It is not that Mr Derrida's views, or his arguments for them, were unusually contentious. There were no arguments, nor really any views either. He would have been the first to admit this. He not only contradicted himself, over and over again, but vehemently resisted any attempt to clarify his ideas. “A critique of what I do”, he said, “is indeed impossible.”

There has always been a market for obscurantism. Socrates railed against the followers of Heraclitus of Ephesus for much the same reasons that Mr Derrida's critics berate his unfortunate disciples:

If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you're transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You'll never get anywhere with any of them.

Subjected to his weak puns (“logical phallusies” was a famous example), bombastic rhetoric and illogical ramblings, an open-minded reader might suspect Mr Derrida of charlatanism. That would be going too far, however. He was a sincere and learned man, if a confused one, who offered some academics and students just what they were looking for.

Mr Derrida's father was a salesman of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Born in a suburb of Algiers, Jacques was expelled from his school at the age of 12 because of the Vichy government's racial laws. With some difficulty, in 1952 he succeeded in entering the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and attended the lectures of Michel Foucault. He began to lecture at the Ecole Normale in 1964. Two years later, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he laid the foundations of his reputation in America with a bold new way to approach literary texts and lay bare their ideological presuppositions. Three books followed in 1967, including “Of Grammatology” and “Writing and Difference”. A radical star was born.

Mr Derrida's style of deconstruction flowered especially in American departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism. Although by the early 1980s French academics had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America's teachers of literature increasingly embraced Mr Derrida. Armed with an impenetrable new vocabulary, and without having to master any rigorous thought, they could masquerade as social, political and philosophical critics. Mr Derrida always denied any responsibility for the undisciplined nihilism of his imitators, who gave the strong impression that deconstructionism had somehow succeeded in undermining, or even in refuting, the notion of objective truth. But his work could not easily be interpreted in any other way.

The fog of words

A crisis came in 1987. The New York Times revealed that Paul de Man, a friend of Mr Derrida's and one of America's leading deconstructionists, had written anti-Semitic articles for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1940-42. Coincidentally, also in 1987, evidence began to emerge of the hidden Nazi past of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had been a major influence on Mr Derrida. Mr Derrida's response was disastrous. He used deconstructionist techniques to defend the two men, laying down a fog of convoluted rhetoric in a doomed attempt to exonerate them. This fed straight into the hands of his critics, who had always argued that the playful evasiveness of deconstruction masked its moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The New York Review of Books quipped that deconstruction means never having to say you're sorry.

Mr Derrida also pursued far worthier causes. He fought for the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, opposed apartheid and campaigned for Czech dissidents. As his influence waned, his fame grew. Abandoning his earlier reticence, he submitted to interviews and photographs. He confessed to disliking Woody Allen's comedy, “Deconstructing Harry”. The books continued to flow (80 volumes in all) as his concerns moved away from literary and philosophical texts to ethical and political subjects, but they were no easier to follow. In his final years he became increasingly concerned with religion, and some theologians started to show interest in his work. God help them.