A Legend Passes Away
By Elyse Weingarten

Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, 'given', one can say, by death." – from Derrida’s Donner la mort (1995)

On October 8th 2004, the great French philosopher Jacques Derrida passed away. Derrida was the father of ‘deconstructionism,’ a critical practice that questions the foundation of Western thought by exploring the inherent instability present in language. From it ground-breaking conception in Derrida’s 1967 texts, “Of Grammatology” and “Writing and Difference,” deconstruction has heralded the death of the author by arguing that meaning has limitless layers of interpretation, not all viable at the conscious level. Through out his life, Derrida wrote hundreds of books and essays that reread and deconstructed great philosophers such as Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche and ideals such as giving and forgiveness. In recent years, deconstruction has become the dominant discourse of academia and has seeped into pop-culture reference.

In the days that followed Derrida’s death, major news publications from around the world reported his demise. What is most interesting is the manner in which these memorials appear. While most were respectful, written in the conventional language of the obituary genre, there were some that pressed the limits of what could be considered respectful, working with word-play, self contradiction and lyricism— (ironically) a testament to everything deconstruction represents. Some of the memorials went as far as mentioning Derrida’s infamous ties to supposed anti-Semites Heidegger and Paul de Man, the controversy that greeted Derrida’s theory at institutions such as the University of Cambridge, and some even went further, defiling deconstructionism and presenting Derrida as a charlatan posing as a philosopher. The most surprising, most outlandish of the bunch was Jonathan Kandell’s October 10th obituary published in The New York Times. “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74,” the mordant title reads. With this sardonic title as an introduction, Kandell continues to condescend Derrida and his work. Here are just a few excepts of the article:

Typical of Mr. Derrida's murky explanations of his philosophy was a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: ''Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.''

He could be an indifferent student. He failed his baccalaureate in his first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the École Normal Supérieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, where he was finally admitted in 1952…For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure. Yet he did not defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old.

By the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic. But he continued to commute between France and the United States, where he was paid hefty fees to lecture a few weeks every year at several East Coast universities and the University of California at Irvine.

A former Yale student, Amy Ziering Kofman, focused on him in a 2002 documentary, ''Derrida,'' that some reviewers found charming.

Within days, The New York Times was overwhelmed with letters of protest from Derrida’s peers and friends. Among those that protested was Berkley theorist Judith Butler, who accused Kandell’s article of being a “vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida [that] takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time.” Butler continues, “Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most.” Theorist Yve-Alain Bois of Harvard wrote, “Topping the Times…habit of entrusting the composition of obituaries to overt opponents of the deceased supposed to be memorialized, the article by a Jonathan Kandell on Jacques Derrida, who died this past Friday, reaches a peak of populist anti-intellectualism--not to speak of the countless distortions it contains--that I thought only possible in a Murdoch publication.”

By the two week anniversary of Derrida’s death, the University of California at Irvine had set up a website dedicated to this protest, with links to letters sent to the NY Times and a guestbook of signatures from academics, artists, students and politicians from around the world. Written on the website as an explanation:

Jacques Derrida died in Paris on Friday, October 8, 2004. The first occasion for this site was an obituary published by the New York Times on October 10, 2004, deemed by many of Jacques' colleagues, friends, and supporters to be unjust, disrespectful, and unbalanced. A letter written by Samuel Weber and Kenneth Reinhard to the New York Times quickly gathered so many signatures that we realized a web site was needed to record the names of those who wished to be heard.

I think is to necessary to reflect on what it means to a culture when letters are written to a newspaper protesting a published obituary. It is perhaps both a symptom of progressive democracy and unspeakable decay. And in thinking about it, I wonder why we so shocked by this blatant disregard for the respect a man deserves when his death is announced. In reality, the obituary genre is bland, a fiction full of meaningless anecdotes exploited to prove that this one person was worthier than all persons could ever be combined. The pretensions of the obituary are self-fulfilling and in direct contradiction to the actual harshness of the time that follows an individual’s death. After the brief sentimentalities of the funeral and the condolences, skeletons inevitably come tumbling out of the closet. Grievances are finally filed, private diaries are read irrevocably, Wills render exclusivity among family ties, and in the case of intellectuals, cowards that were mute during the deceased’s life span, pop up to grab their prize. Anything can be said because the dead cannot talk back. In this way, death is deconstruction’s variation on a theme. If there is, as Derrida famously wrote ‘No outside the text,’ then all is, already and always, fair game, full of unanswered questions, hidden meanings, and insurmountable language ready to be decoded again and again. So is the cycle of life/language.

Perhaps we should look Kandell’s piece another way: as homage to Derrida. In his article, Kandell acknowledges the artifice of the obituary. He exposes the language of the funeral address: the fact is that we do not always like or respect every man that dies. By triumphing over convention, Kendall shocks us. He tells it like he thinks it is. And as a result, we are summoned to the reality principle, so to speak. This is not to say that I am excusing Kandell. Hardly. I believe that Kandell’s article was inappropriate, at best rude and ignorant; at worst, the work of a scoundrel attempting to exploit Derrida’s death and promote his own intellectual agenda. But it also serves as an encore to Derrida’s life, an ironic instant when deconstruction is right on the mark -- just when it seems to have reached its very end. Kandell threw renown scholars off their game. And for what? What is the booming battle cry of the philosophers? It is a cry for human decency, a cry that tells us that perhaps there is rhyme and reason to the lies we tell ourselves.

But behind Derrida’s death (the derriere of Derrida) is another, more ubiquitous question buzzing in everyone’s ears—has theory at last, finally, died its last death now that its master is gone? The resounding answer, for better or worse, is a definite No. Theory will undoubtedly survive as it always has, mutating through the epochs of discourse. However, it is irrefutable that something has been taken with Derrida’s passing. One of the most important philosophers of all times, Derrida has colored all the far reaches of every academic discipline, pop culture and the arts. His death means that no more genitive Derridean work will be produced, perhaps opening the space for other readings within intellectual circles. In truth, only the future can tell what theory will bring.