Derrida deconstructed

Eager student accidentally makes baffling French bloviator disappear by proving he doesn't exist

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously irksome philosophers of the late 20th century, seemed to cease to exist on or about Friday, October 8 at a Paris hospital, the French president’s office announced. He was 74.

The cause of death was initially thought to be pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The Associated Press reported. The Modern Language Association and the Chronicle of Higher Education contended that Derrida’s refusal to allow the signifier to suffer coincidence with its signified might have done him in. Somebody said maybe Hilton Kramer shot him with the canon.
However, it turned out that a sophomore English student at Ohio State had inadvertently proven that Mr. Derrida did not, in fact, exist while trying to simultaneously make sense of and deconstruct “Of Grammatology,” Mr. Derrida’s intensive study aimed at finding out what his grandmother was really like. When that happened, the goofy-looking deep thinker suddenly disappeared.

The student, whose name, being nothing more than a random collection of meaningless phonemes commonly agreed to confer and signify status and the perpetuation of a patriarchal system of bourgeois primogeniture, is immaterial, said he felt “kinda bad” about having made Mr. Derrida disappear suddenly in a puff of acrid Gauloise smoke. He has been offered full professorships at numerous university English departments, and preparations continue for a tickertape parade in his honor, paid for by everybody who ever had to listen to some deconstruction-addled sophomore yammering about how nothing means anything because some French guy said so.

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, as well as its mother, a “mother,” a bad mother (shut your mouth) and its orphan. It was a method of securing tenure that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts — whether literature, history, philosophy or Walter Scott’s “Personality Parade” in the Sunday paper — of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. Read a paragraph of Mr. Derrida’s baffling, tortured, tautological plafoodoo and you’ll get a sense of what that means. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture but most especially to anything that was suspected of having been written or read by a Caucasian male, especially a dead Caucasian male.

While he had a huge following — larger in the United States (where his rookie card is now worth four dollars) than in Europe — Mr. Derrida was the target of as much teasing and derisive hooting as admiration. For many Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards of classical education, despite the fact it was never remotely cogent or intelligible enough to do that. They also did not like its excessive snootiness, nor did they care for its claims of association with divisive political causes which were almost universally nothing more than standard-issue sophomoric flirtations with introductory Marxism. The fact deconstruction made absolutely no sense and could not be defined or explained on even the most rudimentary level by anybody was just icing on the textual cake.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings using a little hammer and several sets of special tweezers and rat-tail combs as well as oyster forks before forcing the resulting mushy residue through several used coffee filters. Many of the meanings they found were so well hidden that nobody had noticed them during centuries of close reading and analysis. For the deconstructionists, that process became particularly important if anything outside that paragraph didn’t match the wishful, fictional subverted “meaning” they ascribed to the tiny slice they’d chosen to focus their laser-like powers of credulity on. This happened just about the time people were pretty much convinced there couldn’t possibly be anything more ridiculous than semiotics. Boy, were they wrong. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other “dead white male” icons of Western culture. Architects and designers could claim to take a “deconstructionist” approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting, annoying or just plain butt-ugly spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of his movies “Deconstructing Harry,” to suggest that his protagonist could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his neurotic contradictions. Or maybe just to shoehorn a briefly trendy word into a movie title in order to mock it. Or maybe not.

Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word of intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism — two other fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from France after World War II like a gaseous bubble out of too much thick, heavy cream sauce — had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his followers were unwilling — some say “couldn’t be bothered” — to define deconstruction with any precision or even in a half-assed sloppy way, so it has remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways, all of which suited the deconstructionists just fine, since they always hoped somebody would just stumble on a definition and blurt out something they could use. But that never happened.

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. Or the impossibility of experience. Or maybe it doesn’t. I’m really not sure. And don’t hold me to that assertion that I’m not sure, because I might not be any too sure about that, either. Unless I am, but that’s subject to interpretation. Unless it isn’t. Maybe. Oh wow. Have you ever really, like, looked at your hands, man?”

Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various aspects of deconstruction didn’t make a lot of sense. However, they were certainly thick, both in the sense of “having many pages” and in the sense of “obtuse.” Even some of their titles — “Of Grammatology,” “The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,” “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” “Papa Oom Mow Mow: Funniest Sound I Ever Heard,” “Louie Lou-eye, Oh Baby, We Gotta Go Now,” “Gabba Gabba Hey,” “Bomp Buh Buh Bomp, De Dang De Dang-Dang, De Ding De Dong Ding, Blue Moon,” “Everybody Knows That the Bird Is The Word,” “Who Put the Bomp In The Bomp-Shoo Bomp-Shoo Bomp; Who Put The Ram In the Rama Lama Ding Dong?,” “Marvel Spectacular Superstar Battle Royal: Hulk vs. Thing” — could be off-putting to the uninitiated, the initiated, and initially.

“Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise — if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it,” Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine. Now, thanks to a zealous little grind at Ohio State, it would seem that has finally come to pass, although the fact that Derrida is dead means there will probably be even more contention and faculty-lounge squabbling over his jumbled legacy of half-baked yawp.

Mr. Derrida’s credibility, such as it was, was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed exponent of deconstruction in the United States and the origin of the phrase, “you de Man,” a term of approbation from Yale undergraduates whenever one of their number said something particularly confusing, annoying or meaningless. Four years after Mr. de Man’s death, it turned out he was a Nazi who’d written a thick wad of pro-Nazi articles for a Nazi newspaper in Belgium while it was under German occupation during World War II. In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. de Man’s anti-Semitism. In fact, he was sharing it, not condoning it.

Nonetheless, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, Mr. Derrida’s “writings” and lectures gained him a huge following in major American universities at a time when heavy recreational drug use was common among both students and faculty. Mr. Derrida proved far more influential in the United States than in France. Go figure. For young, ambitious professors, his teachings became a gold-plated ticket to tenure. For many students, deconstruction was a rite of passage into the world of rebellious intellect. For many more, it was a king-size load of industrial-strength bullshit they were powerless to avoid. Its pervasiveness, combined with the demand of every English department that they either swallow the Kool-Aid or get off the bus made it impossible to get away from, no matter how hard they tried.

Jacques Derrida was hatched on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His father was a salesman. His mother was dismayed. Even as a teenager, Mr. Derrida was a voracious reader whose eclectic interests embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and the poet Paul Valéry. Unfortunately, although he read widely, he did not understand anything he read.

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 just to shut him up. Unfortunately, that did not work. There he failed the oral portion of his final exams on his first attempt, which should have been a hint. After graduation in 1956, he studied briefly at Harvard University. Because he did not speak English, it was difficult and he did not distinguish himself. For most of the next 30 years, he taught philosophy and logic — mostly by denying they existed — at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure, despite not being employed as a teacher at either institution. Yet he did not defend his doctoral dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old and enough of a big-shot that nobody dared tell him he was full of hot gas. Most people would have figured out by this point that a career as an academic was probably not for them. Not Mr. Derrida.

By the early 1960’s, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a rising young intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language and philosophy in leading academic journals that nobody read and by occasionally floating several inches off the ground. He claimed to have been especially influenced by the German philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, both of whom he claimed were his close personal friends, even though Husserl died in 1938 and Heidegger said, “who’s doing what now?” when asked about Derrida. Both were strong critics of traditional metaphysics, a branch of philosophy which explored the basis and perception of reality. Mr. Derrida spent much of his time detached from reality, saying he considered it “a total bringdown.”

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. Or maybe it was bafflement. For many years, he declined to be photographed for publication, fearing his soul would be stolen. “Bad juju,” he would mutter, putting his hands over his face and hissing. He cut a dashing, handsome figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of prematurely white hair, tanned complexion, well-tailored suits, big floppy shoes and squirting lapel flower. He peppered his lectures with puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, like, “Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun,” or, “Too sweet to be sour, to nice to be mean, if I was breakfast sausage, I’d be the Jimmy Dean,” or, “Oh my friends, there is no friend,” something he usually said when people called him “my friend” and expected him to pay for the drinks. Then he would pull his empty pockets inside out and pout in an exaggerated, clownish manner while shrugging Gallicly.

Many readers found his prose turgid and baffling, even as nervous undergraduates eager to impress their T.A.’s claimed to find it “illuminating.” A single sentence could run for three pages, and a footnote even longer, and not one word of it would make even the slightest amount of sense, even by accident. Sometimes his books were written in “deconstructed” style. For example, “Glas” (1974) offers commentaries on the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the French novelist Jean Genet in parallel columns of the book’s pages; in between, there is an occasional third column of commentary about the two men’s ideas. A fourth column of text was published in another book entirely, no longer in print, and a fifth column was hidden in the old oak tree where it was eventually found by Joe and Frank’s chubby pal, Chet, and turned over to Detective Hardy.

Mr. Derrida appeared suddenly on the American intellectual landscape with a soft “pwoip” at a 1966 conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Its high priest was French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who studied societies through their linguistic structure when he wasn’t sewing blue jeans with little red tabs on the edge of the back pocket or trying to deconstruct them using a pair of horses and some old-timey ’49er prospectors.

Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that structuralism was already passé in France, and that Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, like his pants, were too rigid, at least until they’d been through the wash a couple of times. Instead, Mr. Derrida offered deconstruction as the new, triumphant philosophy without bothering to explain what it was.

His presentation fired up young professors who were in search of a new intellectual movement to call their own. Others said, “Wha—?”

Many people wondered why the deconstructionists, so intent on proving that “texts” meant nothing because they contradicted themselves, never applied that rigorous negation to teaching contracts, students’ marks, tenure, grant applications or their paychecks, all texts which were apparently sacrosanct and somehow magically resistant to any attempts at being rendered meaningless.

Mr. Derrida’s influence was especially strong in the Yale University literature department, where one of his close friends, Belgian-born Nazi, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champignon of deconstruction in literary analysis, and where they seemed to get a bang out of this kind of crap. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from war-torn Europe, and even left the impression among particularly credulous colleagues that he had joined the Belgian resistance. But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man’s death, research revealed that he had written over 170 articles in the early 1940s for Le Soir, a Nazi newspaper in Belgium. Apparently, the only thing he ever resisted was not being a Nazi.

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where the late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr. Derrida defended Mr. de Man, and even used literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the Belgian scholar’s newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic. Anybody with any remaining doubt about the intellectual, historical or moral bankruptcy of deconstruction had to concede that Derrida’s stunt pretty much exemplified the banality of evil. Despite all that, some folks just couldn't figure it out, and continued to insist that deconstruction was still valid, applying it to everything from music videos to Bazooka Joe comics.

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. Many gullible saps still refused to realize that deconstruction was basically some weird kind of fascism rewind in fake Marxist drag.

By the late 1980’s, Mr. Derrida’s intellectual star was on the wane on both sides of the Atlantic. But he remained a big draw at some East Coast universities and, for some inexplicable reason, at the University of California at Irvine, where he often flung sweat-soaked pages of his books to hordes of screeching fans and would usually offer his time-tested “built-in encore” of deconstructing “Slow Ride” by Foghat.

In his early years of intellectual fame, Mr. Derrida was criticized by European leftists for a lack of commitment to any political ideas except those shared by people who enjoyed goose-stepping, shiny boots and swastikas. But in the 1980’s, in a desperate, pathetic, day-late, dollar-short lunge for political correctness to pander to his fans on campuses in the United States, he became conspicuously active in a number of political causes, opposing apartheid, defending Czech dissidents, supporting the rights of North African immigrants in France, and saying that New Coke was not that good and that he preferred Dick Sargent's Darrin to that of Dick York on “Bewitched.”

Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He marketed a line of talking dolls that babbled nonsense. Later there were T-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and cardboard cutouts of Mr. Derrida's head that made automobile interiors smell like a crochety French college professor. He sat still for photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly mysterious aura to reveal the mundane details of his personal life. And boy, were they mundane.

Rather than hang around the Left Bank cafés traditionally inhabited by French intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a suburb south of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his large wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst who married him because, she said, she had “never met anybody that screwy. It would take a lifetime to cure him, and I love a challenge.” The couple had two sons, Pierre and Jean. He also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a philosophy teacher who later married the French political leader Lionel Jospin, who later married Marguerite Aucouturier, who was already married to Jacques Derrida, who was his own grandpa, as he conclusively proved in “Of Grampatology,” the sequel to “Of Grammatology.”

As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a professional soccer player. Soccer’s loss was philosophy’s disaster, and Mr. Derrida spent the rest of his life kicking Socrates, James Joyce, Shakespeare and everybody but Nazis instead of a leather spheroid. He also admitted to watching way too much television, happily gazing slack-jawed at everything from news to soap operas, and pestering Ms. Aucouturier to buy absolutely everything he saw advertised.

Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, what the hell deconstruction was. “Why don’t you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?” he replied, frostily, to a reporter in a 1998 interview. “Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand enough to understand more.”

“I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” the reporter admitted later. “But it was obvious he didn’t either, so that kind of evened things out. And ‘audiences at my lectures in the thousands’? Please. Come on. I guess he couldn’t count any better than he could read or write.”

Asked later in the same interview to at least take a wild stab at defining deconstruction, just for the hell of it for once, Mr. Derrida said: “It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied.”

For the first and only time in his life, Mr. Derrida’s readers and several generations of college students knew exactly what he meant.