Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Gone, but still with us
The death occurred a couple of weeks ago of one of the most influential men in modern western thinking, yet his passing was barely noticed in New Zealand media.
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, has had an incalculable effect on the way we think today, even though 99 people on the street out of 100 would never have heard of him.
Derrida was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Chuck Colson says Derrida may have just been having fun: "I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense. While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
"If Derrida’s maxim that 'there is nothing outside the text' had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, 'anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.'
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
The death occurred a couple of weeks ago of one of the most influential men in modern western thinking, yet his passing was barely noticed in New Zealand media.
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, has had an incalculable effect on the way we think today, even though 99 people on the street out of 100 would never have heard of him.
Derrida was the father of “deconstruction.” That is the literary theory that says that “all writing [is] full of confusion and contradiction . . . the author’s intent [can] not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself.” So, all texts, whether literary, historical, or philosophical, are devoid of “truthfulness, absolute meaning, and permanence.”
Chuck Colson says Derrida may have just been having fun: "I often thought that he put out these unfathomable statements just to watch the confusion. Intellectuals took him seriously and thought he was saying something so profound that their problem was that they did not understand it. So they held conferences to try to figure him out. All the while he was being entertained, however, he created huge mischief: People believed his intellectual nonsense. While his French contemporaries dismissed him, he soon found a receptive audience in America. A generation of American scholars has championed his theories, especially at Yale, where Paul de Man, Derrida’s close friend, taught.
"If Derrida’s maxim that 'there is nothing outside the text' had been limited to literary theory, he might not have done much damage. However, deconstruction broke out of the literature department and was applied to almost every non-scientific discipline: history, 'anthropology, political science, [and] even architecture.'
An example of this took place at Duke Law School. There, Stanley Fish, America’s leading deconstructionist, although not a lawyer, taught courses in law, admitting that he knew nothing about law. Why would we need to? If, like Fish and Derrida, you believe that “there is nothing outside the text” except what the reader brings to it, it doesn’t matter what others have thought and written about the law.
We will be living with the consequences for a long time. A generation of Americans has been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objective truth, only preferences, and one person’s preference is as good as anyone else’s. If students read books at all, they care less about what the author had to say than about their own opinions and feelings.
