Derrida's NYT obituary sent chills down my spine

For anyone still wondering why JP seems to reflexively return to the problem of Postmoderism in his thought, have a look at the New York Times obituary for Jacques Derrida. This unflattering article was written in 2004, when he died, and in the 14 year space between, we can see how quickly one of the most well respected newspapers in the world fell so far.

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.

They seem to predict their own demise, here, as though it was known fourteen years later they would happily hire an openly racist journalist because, what she said wasn't to be taken literally, of course, it was simply satire gone amok.

And he admitted to being an inveterate viewer of television, watching everything from news to soap operas. "I am critical of what I'm watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I deconstruct all the time."

Where the internet bleeds into our everyday lives, the easier it is to make deconstructionism a lifestyle. It isn't the musings of a man in the late 80s, alone on his couch, taking absurd thought experiments to their absolute limits in front of a television. It is pushed onto the internet, politicized, deployed en masse. The rigors keeping truth alive crumble.

Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, Mr. Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied."

This is what happens when everything is a nail and no one knows how to build a hammer. You question the right for the nail to exist.

Submitted August 27, 2018 at 10:35PM by FirstLastMan https://ift.tt/2BPtBZl