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Critics blasted his writings
as absurd (Agencies) |
Jacques Derrida, one of France's best-known philosophers and the
founder of the deconstructionist school, has died of cancer at the age of
74, his entourage said.
He had been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas in 2003.
Derrida's prolific writings, criticised
by some as obscure and nihilist
, argue that in literature -- but also in fields such as art,
music, architecture -- there are multiple meanings not necessarily
intended or even understood by the creator of the work.
"To 'deconstruct' is to take an idea, institution or value and
understand its mechanisms by removing the cement that makes it up," one
critic has said.
Born in Algeria in 1930 Derrida went to France's celebrated Ecole
Normale Superieur in 1952, then became an assistant professor at Harvard
in the United States and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Throughout his life he taught both in France and in the United States.
Among the influences on his thought were the German philosopher Martin
Heidegger and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
"(Deconstruction) is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a
theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings,"
according to John Lye of Brock University in Ontario, Canada.
"Its impact on literature is based in part on the fact that
deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process
rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and
conventions of writing," said Brock.
Deconstructivism is also known for the "intensity of its sense that
human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought
would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory
ways, so that certainty will always elude us."
Derrida was not always appreciated by fellow
academics. When Britain's Cambridge University planned to award him an
honorary degree in 1992 many staff protested and his writings were
denounced as "absurd doctrines
that
deny the distinction between reality and fiction."
In the end his degree was approved by 336 votes to 204.
In 1981 the Czech authorities put him in prison for several days
because of his public backing for the intellectuals who had published
Charter 77, calling for greater freedom.
Married to a psychoanalyst, he was a grandfather. He had a child with
Sylviane Agacinski, now married to former socialist leader Lionel Jospin,
of whom he was a political ally during the 1995 presidential election.
(Agencies) |