French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, dies age 74.

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Love him or loathe him - he is dead....

"Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74
By JONATHAN KANDELL

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced. He was 74.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French television, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry 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 or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.

While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in Europe - he was the target of as much anger 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, and one they often associated with divisive political causes.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings. 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 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.........."

Full New York Times Obituary here

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For those unfamiliar with his theories, who wish for a quick journey through deconstruction and so on, here is the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Derrida&fulltext=Search

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Brief summary of deconstruction:

Deconstruction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
In Continental philosophy and literary criticism, deconstruction is a school of criticism created by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida offered what he called deconstructive readings of Western philosophers. Roughly speaking, a deconstructive reading is an analysis of a text that uncovers the difference between the text's structure and its Western metaphysical essence. Deconstructive readings show how Western texts cannot simply be read as a single author communicating a distinct message, but instead must be read as sites of conflict within a given culture or worldview. A deconstructed text will reveal a multitude of viewpoints simultaneously existing, often in direct conflict with one another. Comparison of a deconstructive reading of a text with a more traditional one will also show how many of these viewpoints are suppressed and ignored.

The central move of a deconstructive analysis is to look at binary oppositions within a text (for instance, maleness and femaleness, or gayness and straightness) and to show how, instead of describing a rigid set of categories, the two opposing terms are actually fluid and impossible to fully separate. The conclusion from this, generally, is that the categories do not actually exist in any rigid or absolute sense.

Deconstruction was highly controversial both in academia, where it was accused of being nihilistic, parasitic, and just plain silly, and in the popular press, where it was often seized upon as a sign that academia had become completely out of touch with reality. Despite this controversy, it remains a major force in contemporary philosophy and literary criticism and theory.

Excerpted from here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

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And cursory searching:

"Jacques Derrida

Introduction to Jacques Derrida
by Roger Geertz Gonzalez

When discussing contemporary cultural theory such as structuralism, postructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminist theory, and cultural studies, you will most likely encounter a common, foundational lexicon. This includes words such as "trace," "presence," "difference," "deconstruction," "logos," and "play." Their birth took place with the publication of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida analyzes and criticizes Western Philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratics to Heidegger and beyond. His fundamental criticism of Western Philosophy is that it privileges or favors "logos," or speech. According to him, logos claim and pretend to exhibit a direct form of language and therefore, a tight closeness to a specific "presence" or center of identity/subjectivity. Western Philosophy while praising logos, debases "writing." Ironically, these philosophers try to imprint writing with logos patterns. Thus, writing or "texts" claims and pretends to exhibit a presence of identity/subjectivity, a presence of authority, and a presence of power.

To debunk this idea, Derrida develops a method to identify these patterns. He calls it "deconstruction." What deconstruction does is to identify logocentric paradigms, such as dichotomies, and show that the possibility of presence within any contextual language is in constant "play" and "differs" continously in relation to something else, and because of this, only a "trace" of the subject/object exists.

Some critics claim that deconstruction as an analytical method is either slowly fading or already dead. What these critics tend to ignore is that new paradigms must build on the old ones for guidance and growth in the world of theory........."

http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/derrida.html

http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.html

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I guess worms and microbes be the ultimate deconstructionists......

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French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, dies age 74.

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