"Utter caprice, extreme subjectivity, and hence the destruction of the very concepts of knowledge and truth"
Listen to what else they're saying about Jacques Derrida:
- "a rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect"
- "nihilistic"
- "writings are 'absurd,' but his mark on modern thinking is undisputed"
- "loathed, adored and seldom fully comprehended"
Derrida has certainly shaped my own intellectual dwelling, and "deconstruction" of a sort is stock-in-trade for my therapeutic work. A memory emerged upon hearing of his death:
In February 1996, I was stranded on a Utah ski lift with a ski instructor who had been a student of Derrida's at UCal-Irvine (see where a Master's in English can get you?).
In the snowy silence, hundreds of feet above a mountain as wrinkled as a Sharpei pup, we proceeded to deconstruct the meaning of ski slopes, ski lifts, and the inability to control one's descent from the top.
Derrida's influence had truly reached everywhere, I think.
[I later emasculated the ski instructor at the bottom of the slope by running into him in order to stop myself, but that's a different story.]
Here's how the Guardian summed up Derrida's work:
He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts--which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" (differance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, October 11, 2004