[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Two more Derrida obits!]

[Terry W. Colvin]

Father of Deconstructionism Dies, If 'Death' Means Anything 

by  Scott Ott (2004-10-10) -- French President Jacques Chirac announced today
that Jacques Derrida, the father of the intellectual movement called
deconstructionism, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, "if indeed 'death' can
be said to mean anything beyond the biases of culture, language, religion and
philosophy." 

"Of course, we can't assert anything positively about Monsieur Derrida's recent
failure to exist," said Mr. Chirac, "We can't even state that he ever did exist,
since he may have been a mere metaphysical projection of our own prejudices
against absolutes. However, in as much as we may categorically claim
anything--Mr. Derrida will not likely be showing up for work tomorrow. Although,
who is to say?" 

Mr. Derrida's many books and teachings spawned legions of American college
professors whose stock-in-trade is to "deconstruct" literature and philosophy in
order to demonstrate that, for example, the so-called classics of Western
literature are so distorted by their authors' cultural prejudices as to render
them useful only for literary deconstruction. 

"Monsieur Derrida bequeathed a magnificent legacy to the global intellectual
community," said Mr. Chirac. "He has provided us all with the intellectual
infrastructure to prevent us from seeking after truth. Thanks to him we know it
is fruitless to assert anything with conviction, or to say that any ideology is
less true than any other. They are all equally trifling. Their value, if any,
lies only in the sport they provide for college professors." 

In lieu of flowers, friends of Mr. Derrida are urged to devote their lives to
convincing at least one young person that there is nothing to which it is worth
devoting one's life. 

<http://www.scrappleface.com/> 

************************************************************ 

October 11, 2004 

Is Derrida dead? 

A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality 

Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists'
objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily,
subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are
mere "narrations" or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist
deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational
conceptual categories of prior science - among them, Derrida's own existence -
which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has
profound implications for the content of future postmodern and liberatory
science of mortality. Is God dead? 

It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma
imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal's
inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The
epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering
the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge,
thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and
his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple
"either/or" structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that
says neither "either/or" nor "both/and" nor even "neither/nor" while at the same
time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida
irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M. Derrida is in no
position to enlighten us. 

< http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-1303821,00.html >

Larry


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Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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