NP - Derrida

[David Morris]

http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/comment/comment-goldblatt011603.asp

Zeitgeist Films, distributor of the documentary Derrida, currently in limited
release in select cities across the country, poses the following rhetorical
question on its promotional website: What if you could watch Socrates, on film,
rehearsing his Socratic dialogues? The insinuation, of course, is that Jacques
Derrida, the contemporary French thinker sometimes called the "father of
deconstruction" deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the ancient
Greek thinker sometimes called the "father of philosophy." This is true only
insofar as a firecracker and a hydrogen bomb both go pop. Otherwise, the
comparison is ludicrous.

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida — the
man who is the subject of the movie — is that he is not now, nor has he ever
been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a
trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a
polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in
the United States — a species whose gullibility ranks them somewhere between
nine-year-old boys listening to spooky campfire stories and blissful puppies
chasing after nonexistent sticks — into believing that postmodernism has an
underlying theoretical rationale. History will remember Derrida, and it surely
will, not for what he himself has said but for what his revered status says
about us.



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