The great deconstruction we all must one day face...

[catscradle]

Got this from plaidder while thumbing through my friend's pages:

Deconstruction icon Derrida dies

Jacques Derrida, one of France's most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74. The Algerian-born philosopher is best known for his "deconstruction theory" - unpicking the way text is put together in order to reveal its hidden meanings.

Ah Jacques... what I understood, I admired. You really put the thumb screws to academia. I recall a few years ago my thesis advisor delivering a paper on deconstructionism at a conference Derrida was also attending in New York. He was stopped on his way back to Denver at the airport and held at gun point till security (then the US military) was certain that the box of pastries he was bringing back wasn't something like a bomb or antrax or maybe even a nuclear weapon. The entire time he was terrified they were going to search his briefcase and discovered all the xeroxes of papers Derrida has given to him. Carl was afraid that if found, security would certainly think him a far greater threat than if the pastries turned out to contain small pox spores. When the soldiers were convinced they were just little cakes, they let Carl go without discovering the philosophical contraband in the briefcase. Close call.

Comments

[vasiliki.livejournal.com]

Damn, last year Edward Said, now Derrida... I feel that the world becomes a poorest place for those left behind. :(

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I felt that way a few years ago when we lost Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. But on the bright side we still have Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, Eric Singer... Hmmm... I'll have to look up the new faces in the field. Now that post modernism is on the way out of philosophical vogue, perhaps there are some new revolutionaries on the rise in the field.