langue, parole, canards
Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74. Of pancreatic cancer, no less; that's a nasty one. Death so instantly drapes an aura of somberness and respect around the deceased—I agreed with none of the man's tenets, insofar as I understood what those tenets were, but he was still one of us, still fighting the good fight for culture. He took his work seriously. And even if plenty of his followers muddied their language to the point of incomprehensibility in order to disguise their lack of insight, I never thought he was guilty of this. Whatever he was trying to say, he truly believed it could only be expressed through the means he had chosen. So, Derrida est mort, vive Derrida—not in the sense, God knows, that I wish deconstruction a fruitful continued life in the academy, but for good or ill he's taken his place in the Tradition (how you like that New Critical term, y'all?). We'll have to remember what he did, and account for it.
