PARIS (Reuters) – French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose work is credited with originating the school of deconstruction, has died of cancer at the age of 74, France Info radio has said…[Jacques Derrida] said the traditional or metaphysical way of reading makes a number of false assumptions about the nature of texts. His thinking gave rise to the school of deconstruction, a strategy of analysis that…is heralded as showing the multiple layers of meaning at work in language. [Reuters, “French philosopher Derrida dies“, October 9, 2004]
Deconstruction is a philosophy of nihilism that seeks to misuse language to attack the values of Western philosophy under the guise of honest criticism and intellectual creativity. On both counts Deconstructionism is both dishonest in principle and destructive in practice.
According to Deconstructionists, the entire history of Western philosophy suffers from “logocentrism” (system building on central principles or “centers”) and “structuralism” (the idea that words, and sentences, refer to things in, and ideas about, reality) that must be transcended. Under this view, words and sentences are indeterminate in their referent and meaning–they do not have fixed referents in reality, but can refer to, and thus mean, anything. All that remains is a “flow” of language–words that refer to other words ad infinitum (to infinity). All that remains is to “deconstruct”–that is reinterpret–texts with no “bounds” (such as logic, context, or reduction) on ones “play.” An ugly sort of skeptical egalitarianism replaces logic as the means of discovering the truth.
The victims of such an assault are reason (which becomes not guided by logic, but by subjective whim), truth (which becomes the arbitrary), knowledge (knowledge of what?), clarity (replaced with ambiguity–this lack of clarity in academic circles is referred to as “creativity” and “brilliance”), and (no surprise) capitalism. Derrida is the dead-end of Modern philosophy.
“Jacques Derrida is Dead.” Deconstruct that!