Dr. Frank's What's-it

"Thanks to Derrida many new voices were heard" and then utterly dismissed as no deconstructionist can justify listening to them.

I feel like a bit of a fence-sitter here: I dropped out of grad school in the early 90s, fed up with the pointlessness of spending years learning how to impress previous English PhDs enough to get them to give me tenure so that I could then go on to evaluate which future PhDs would merit admission to the tenure club. And I got my BA around the height of American infatuation with deconstruction in the 80s. So a great deal of this stuff seems absolutely pointless and silly to me.

At the same time, I think about 90% of what's produced in Academia is generally pretty silly and pointless, whatever your "theoretical orientation" -- that American Academia will tend to turn almost any idea into a mechanism for career advancement says more about Academia than about any specific idea. Furthermore, virtually no one who wrote an obit on the man seems to have bothered to read anything he wrote! Even this Guardian piece, which I guess is supposed to be pro-Derrida, misses the boat. Here's my two cents (or what I still remember of it):

Derrida both described a critique of Western Philosophy, and argued for a method of reading informed by that critique. Deconstruction is centrally concerned with examining the "binary oppositions" that form the basis of a lot of our philosophical inquiry and thought (e.g. "good/bad" "original/derivative" "high culture/low culture" "honest/deceitful") and showing how, the closer you look the harder it is to distinguish between the two terms you're contrasting. This is where the charges of moral relativism come from. If any of you saw "Adaptation," that was a genuinely deconstructive movie -- it sets up the opposition between commerce and art (embodied by 2 identical twins) and over the course of the movie shows how the 2 opposing visions rely on and are intertwined with each other -- it "deconstructs" the distinction between art and commerce.

Was it worth 6 years of higher ed so that I'd view that movie in that way? No. But it's not the end of the world, either.

"The killer's a literature professor. He cuts off little chunks from his victims' bodies until they die. He calls himself 'the deconstructionist.'"