ZEND MOI UR MESS.AGE.S to haunt Derrida, puleaze.

---------- ce email addy est mort,
------------along with most of T0,
---------so just limited time now.
--------------much love in pieces.
-----------vu les journaux encore?

Mort du philosophe Jacques Derrida

samedi 09 octobre 2004 (Reuters - 20:17)

PARIS - L'un des philosophe français les plus connus à l'étranger, 
notamment aux Etats-Unis, Jacques Derrida est mort dans la nuit de 
vendredi à samedi à l'âge de 74 ans, semble-t-il des suites d'un cancer 
du pancréas.

  Le président Jacques Chirac a déclaré dans un communiqué qu'il avait 
appris "avec tristesse" la disparition "d'une des figures majeures de 
la vie intellectuelle de notre temps".

  "Jacques Derrida était lu, admiré, traduit, publié, enseigné et 
discuté dans le monde entier", écrit le chef de l'Etat. "Il restera 
comme un inventeur, un découvreur, un maître d'une extraordinaire 
fécondité."

  Né le 15 juillet 1930 à El Biar, en Algérie, il était entré au début 
des années 1950 à l'Ecole normale supérieure de Paris, où il fait alors 
connaissance de Louis Althusser, également né en Algérie, qui deviendra 
plus tard son collègue à l'ENS en tant que philosophe marxiste.

  Assistant à l'université américaine de Harvard, puis à la Sorbonne, à 
Paris, Jacques Derrida revient à l'ENS comme professeur de philosophie. 
Il enseignera plus tard, à l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences 
sociales.

  Partageant son enseignement Entre paris et des universités 
américaines, il nourrit la même passion pour la pensée grecque et la 
pensée juive, la philosophie et la poésie.

  Auteur de nombreux livres, il conçoit la philosophie comme une lecture 
critique des textes, développe un mode de pensée dit de la 
"déconstruction" et tente une synthèse entre psychanalyse, marxisme et 
pensée heideggérienne.

  "Il n'aura eu de cesse d'embrasser et d'interroger la tradition 
occidentale dans la diversité de ses sources", souligne Jacques Chirac 
dans son communiqué. "Par ses travaux, il cherchait à retrouver le 
geste libre qui est à l'origine de toute pensée."

  Jacques Derrida a eu un fils avec la philosophe Sylviane Agacinski, 
aujourd'hui épouse de l'ancien Premier ministre socialiste, Lionel 
Jospin. Il avait été membre du comité de soutien de ce dernier lors de 
l'élection présidentielle de 1995.

  Dans une récente interview au Monde, il avait admis être "assez 
dangereusement malade" et "à l'épreuve d'un traitement redoutable".

  "Apprendre à vivre, cela devrait signifier apprendre à mourir, à 
prendre en compte, pour l'accepter, la mortalité absolue, sans salut, 
ni résurrection ni rédemption", estimait-il alors. "Depuis Platon, 
c'est la vieille injonction philosophique : philosopher, c'est 
apprendre à mourir."

  "Je crois à cette vérité sans m'y rendre", ajoutait-il cependant. "De 
moins en moins. Je n'ai pas appris à l'accepter, la mort."


Le philosophe Jacques Derrida est mort
LEMONDE.FR | 09.10.04 | 17h04  •  MIS A JOUR LE 09.10.04 | 18h06

Jacques Derrida était le philosophe français le plus connu à 
l'étranger, notamment aux Etats-Unis, pour son concept de 
"déconstruction".

Le philosophe français le plus commenté et le plus traduit au monde ces 
dernières années, notamment aux Etats-Unis, Jacques Derrida, mort dans 
la nuit de vendredi à samedi à l'âge de 74 ans, était célèbre pour son 
concept de "déconstruction". 
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Selon ses proches, Jacques Derrida, auteur de quelque 80 ouvrages, est 
décédé "sans souffrir" des suites d'un cancer du pancréas dans un 
hôpital parisien où il avait été admis voici environ trois semaines.

Il était le dernier survivant de ces penseurs des années 60, catalogués 
"penseurs de 68", (Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, 
etc..), grands pourfendeurs de la notion de "sujet".

Né le 15 juillet 1930 à El Biar (Algérie) dans une famille juive, 
plutôt à gauche et pied-noir, il entre en 1950 à Normale Sup, devient 
assistant à Harvard (Etats-Unis), puis à la Sorbonne. Il est en 1965 
professeur de philosophie à Normale Sup où il occupe la fonction de 
"caïman" (directeur d'études). Il partage ensuite son enseignement 
entre Paris et diverses universités américaines, parmi les plus 
prestigieuses.

En 1982, il est enfermé quelques jours dans une prison tchèque alors 
qu'il soutenait sur place les intellectuels dissidents de la Charte 77.

LE CONCEPTEUR DE LA "DECONSTRUCTION"

Il engage alors une vaste réflexion critique sur l'institution 
philosophique et l'enseignement de cette matière, créant en 1983 le 
Collège international de philosophie qu'il préside jusqu'en 1985. En 
1988, il dirige, avec Jacques Bouveresse, la commission de philosophie, 
dans le cadre d'une réflexion générale sur les contenus de 
l'enseignement, à l'initiative du ministère de l'éducation.

Il a ensuite enseigné à nouveau aux Etats-Unis, puis à l'Ecole des 
hautes études en sciences sociales à Paris.

"Je n'ai jamais fait de longs séjours aux Etats-Unis, le plus clair de 
mon temps ne se passe pas là-bas. Cela dit, la réception de mon travail 
y a été effectivement plus généreuse, plus attentive, j'y ai rencontré 
moins de censure, de barrages, de conflits qu'en France", déclarait-il 
récemment au journal L'Humanité.

Parmi ses très nombreux livres, qui constituent un dialogue sans 
concession avec la métaphysique occidentale, L'écriture et la 
différence, La dissémination, Marges de la philosophie, Glas, La vérité 
en peinture, Pour Paul Célan, De l'esprit, Heidegger et la question, 
Inventions de l'autre, Du droit à la philosophie, Spectres de Marx, 
Apories ou Résistances de la psychanalyse.

Jacques Derrida, qui portait beau une épaisse chevelure blanche, 
propose, à partir de textes philosophiques classiques, une 
"déconstruction", une critique des présupposés de la parole, une 
manière de défaire de l'intérieur un système de pensée dominant.

"La 'déconstruction', c'est prendre une idée, une institution ou une 
valeur et en comprendre les mécanismes en enlevant le ciment qui la 
constitue. Au-delà de cette expression, qui peut intriguer ou faire 
fuir, c'est un philosophe qui peut aider à la compréhension de la 
société", résumait Franz-Olivier Giesbert en le recevant en 2002 à la 
télévision. Un événement en soi pour cette figure réservée mais ouverte 
aux autres, peu familière du petit écran et qui a longtemps refusé 
toute photo.

Jacques Derrida a été membre du comité de soutien de Lionel Jospin en 
1995. Grand-père, marié à une psychanalyste, il avait eu un fils avec 
Sylviane Agacinski, l'épouse de M. Jospin.

Il n'a pas voté le 21 avril 2001, en signe de "mauvaise humeur contre 
tous les candidats". "Si, pendant longtemps, mes textes ont été 
considérés comme politiquement neutres - alors que mes partis-pris de 
gauche étaient connus - c'est parce qu'attentif depuis toujours à la 
politique, je ne me reconnaissais pas (...) dans les codes politiques 
dominants", confiait-il début 2004.

Avec AFP

  
  
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Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74
By JONATHAN KANDELL
  
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Published: October 10, 2004

Joel Robine/Agence France Presse-Getty Images
Jacques Derrida in January, at his home in France. His 
deconstructionist theory was applied to many arts.

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one 
of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the 
late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French 
president's office announced. He was 74.

  The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to French 
television, The Associated Press reported.

  Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of 
inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and 
contradiction, and that the author's intent could not overcome the 
inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether 
literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning 
and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut 
of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, 
political science, even architecture.

While he had a huge following - larger in the United States than in 
Europe - he was the target of as much anger as admiration. For many 
Americans, in particular, he was the personification of a French school 
of thinking they felt was undermining many of the traditional standards 
of classical education, and one they often associated with divisive 
political causes.

  Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to 
find hidden meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and 
third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the 
prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud 
and other "dead white male" icons of Western culture. Architects and 
designers could claim to take a "deconstructionist" approach to 
buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, 
sometimes disquieting spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of 
his movies "Deconstructing Harry," to suggest that his protagonist 
could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his neurotic 
contradictions.

A Code Word for Discourse

Toward the end of the 20th century, deconstruction became a code word 
of intellectual discourse, much as existentialism and structuralism - 
two other fashionable, slippery philosophies that also emerged from 
France after World War II - had been before it. Mr. Derrida and his 
followers were unwilling - some say unable - to define deconstruction 
with any precision, so it has remained misunderstood, or interpreted in 
endlessly contradictory ways.

  Typical of Mr. Derrida's murky explanations of his philosophy was a 
1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in 
New York, which began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, 
if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the 
impossible."

Mr. Derrida was a prolific writer, but his 40-plus books on various 
aspects of deconstruction were no more easily accessible. Even some of 
their titles - "Of Grammatology," "The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud 
and Beyond," and "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce" - could be 
off-putting to the uninitiated.

"Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing 
for deconstruction's demise - if only to relieve themselves of the 
burden of trying to understand it," Mitchell Stephens, a journalism 
professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New 
York Times Magazine.

Mr. Derrida's credibility was also damaged by a 1987 scandal involving 
Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was the most acclaimed 
exponent of deconstruction in the United States. Four years after Mr. 
de Man's death, it was revealed that he had contributed numerous 
pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles to a newspaper in Belgium, where he was 
born, while it was under German occupation during World War II. In 
defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida, a Jew, was understood by 
some people to be condoning Mr. de Man's anti-Semitism.

A Devoted Following

Nonetheless, during the 1970's and 1980's, Mr. Derrida's writings and 
lectures gained him a huge following in major American universities - 
in the end, he proved far more influential in the United States than in 
France. For young, ambitious professors, his teachings became a 
springboard to tenure in faculties dominated by senior colleagues and 
older, shopworn philosophies. For many students, deconstruction was a 
right of passage into the world of rebellious intellect.

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, Algeria. His 
father was a salesman. At age 12, he was expelled from his French 
school when the rector, adhering to the Vichy government's racial laws, 
ordered a drastic cut in Jewish enrollment. Even as a teenager, Mr. 
Derrida (the name is pronounced day-ree-DAH) was a voracious reader 
whose eclectic interests embraced the philosophers Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and the poet Paul 
Valéry.

But he could be an indifferent student. He failed his baccalaureate in 
his first attempt. He twice failed his entrance exam to the École 
Normal Supérieure, the traditional cradle of French intellectuals, 
where he was finally admitted in 1952. There he failed the oral portion 
of his final exams on his first attempt. After graduation in 1956, he 
studied briefly at Harvard University. For most of the next 30 years, 
he taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the 
École Normal Supérieure. Yet he did not defend his doctoral 
dissertation until 1980, when he was 50 years old.

By the early 1960's, Mr. Derrida had made a name for himself as a 
rising young intellectual in Paris by publishing articles on language 
and philosophy in leading academic journals. He was especially 
influenced by the German philosophers, Edmund Husserl and Martin 
Heidegger. Both were strong critics of traditional metaphysics, a 
branch of philosophy which explored the basis and perception of 
reality.

As a lecturer, Mr. Derrida cultivated charisma and mystery. For many 
years, he declined to be photographed for publication. He cut a 
dashing, handsome figure at the lectern, with his thick thatch of 
prematurely white hair, tanned complexion, and well-tailored suits. He 
peppered his lectures with puns, rhymes and enigmatic pronouncements, 
like, "Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun," 
or, "Oh my friends, there is no friend..."

Many readers found his prose turgid and baffling, even as aficionados 
found it illuminating. A single sentence could run for three pages, and 
a footnote even longer. Sometimes his books were written in 
"deconstructed" style. For example, "Glas" (1974) offers commentaries 
on the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the French 
novelist Jean Genet in parallel columns of the book's pages; in 
between, there is an occasional third column of commentary about the 
two men's ideas.

"The trouble with reading Mr. Derrida is that there is too much 
perspiration for too little inspiration," editorialized The Economist 
in 1992, when Cambridge University awarded the philosopher an honorary 
degree after a bruising argument among his supporters and critics on 
the faculty. Elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Derrida's deconstruction 
philosophy gained earlier and easier acceptance.

Shaking Up a Discipline

Mr. Derrida appeared on the American intellectual landscape at a 1966 
conference on the French intellectual movement known as structuralism 
at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. Its high priest was French 
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who studied societies through their 
linguistic structure.

  Mr. Derrida shocked his American audience by announcing that 
structuralism was already passé in France, and that Mr. Lévi-Strauss's 
ideas were too rigid. Instead, Mr. Derrida offered deconstruction as 
the new, triumphant philosophy.

His presentation fired up young professors who were in search of a new 
intellectual movement to call their own. In a Los Angeles Times 
Magazine article in 1991, Mr. Stephens, the journalism professor, 
wrote: "He gave literature professors a special gift: a chance to 
confront - not as mere second-rate philosophers, not as mere 
interpreters of novelists, but as full-fledged explorers in their own 
right - the most profound paradoxes of Western thought."

"If they really read, if they stared intently enough at the metaphors," 
he went on, "literature professors, from the comfort of their own easy 
chairs, could reveal the hollowness of the basic assumptions that lie 
behind all our writings."

Other critics found it disturbing that obscure academics could presume 
to denigrate a Sophocles, Voltaire or Tolstoy by seeking out cultural 
biases and inexact language in their masterpieces. "Literature, the 
deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the 
wrong people for entirely the wrong reasons," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, a 
British novelist and professor, in a 1991 article for The New York 
Times Book Review.

  Mr. Derrida's influence was especially strong in the Yale University 
literature department, where one of his close friends, a Belgian-born 
professor, Paul de Man, emerged as a leading champion of deconstruction 
in literary analysis. Mr. de Man had claimed to be a refugee from 
war-torn Europe, and even left the impression among colleagues that he 
had joined the Belgian resistance.

  But in 1987, four years after Mr. de Man's death, research revealed 
that he had written over 170 articles in the early 1940's for Le Soir, 
a Nazi newspaper in Belgium. Some of these articles were openly 
anti-Semitic, including one that echoed Nazi calls for "a final 
solution" and seemed to defend the notion of concentration camps.

  "A solution to the Jewish problem that aimed at the creation of a 
Jewish colony isolated from Europe would entail no deplorable 
consequences for the literary life of the West," wrote Mr. de Man.

The revelations became a major scandal at Yale and other campuses where 
the late Mr. de Man had been lionized as an intellectual hero. Some 
former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit 
deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But 
Mr. Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even 
using literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate 
that the Belgian scholar's newspaper articles were not really 
anti-Semitic.

"Borrowing Derrida's logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal 
that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism," scoffed Peter 
Lennon, in a 1992 article for The Guardian. According to another 
critic, Mark Lilla, in a 1998 article in The New York Review of Books, 
Mr. Derrida's contortionist defense of his old friend left "the 
impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you're 
sorry."

Almost as devastating for deconstruction and Mr. Derrida was the 
revelation, also in 1987, that Heidegger, one of his intellectual 
muses, was a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945. 
Once again, Mr. Derrida was accused by critics of being irresolute, 
this time for failing to condemn Heidegger's fascist ideas.

By the late 1980's, Mr. Derrida's intellectual star was on the wane on 
both sides of the Atlantic. But he continued to commute between France 
and the United States, where he was paid hefty fees to lecture a few 
weeks every year at several East Coast universities and the University 
of California at Irvine.

Lifting a Mysterious Aura

In his early years of intellectual fame, Mr. Derrida was criticized by 
European leftists for a lack of political commitment - indeed, for 
espousing a philosophy that attacked the very concept of absolute 
political certainties. But in the 1980's, he became active in a number 
of political causes, opposing apartheid, defending Czech dissidents and 
supporting the rights of North African immigrants in France.

Mr. Derrida also became far more accessible to the media. He sat still 
for photos and gave interviews that stripped away his formerly 
mysterious aura to reveal the mundane details of his personal life.

  A former Yale student, Amy Ziering Kofman, focused on him in a 2002 
documentary, "Derrida," that some reviewers found charming. "With his 
unruly white hair and hawklike face, Derrida is a compelling presence 
even when he is merely pondering a question," wrote Kenneth Turan in 
The Los Angeles Times. "Even his off-the-cuff comments are intriguing, 
because everything gets serious consideration. And when he is wary, 
he's never difficult for its own sake but because his philosophical 
positions make him that way."

  Rather than hang around the Left Bank cafés traditionally inhabited by 
French intellectuals, Mr. Derrida preferred the quiet of Ris-Orangis, a 
suburb south of Paris, where he lived in a small house with his wife, 
Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst. The couple had two sons, 
Pierre and Jean. He also had a son, Daniel, with Sylviane Agacinski, a 
philosophy teacher who later married the French political leader Lionel 
Jospin.

  As a young man, Mr. Derrida confessed, he hoped to become a 
professional soccer player. And he admitted to being an inveterate 
viewer of television, watching everything from news to soap operas. "I 
am critical of what I'm watching," said Mr. Derrida with mock pride. "I 
deconstruct all the time."

Late in his career, Mr. Derrida was asked, as he had been so often, 
what deconstruction was. "Why don't you ask a physicist or a 
mathematician about difficulty?" he replied, frostily, to Dinitia 
Smith, a Times reporter, in a 1998. "Deconstruction requires work. If 
deconstruction is so obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in 
the thousands? They feel they understand enough to understand more."

Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, 
Mr. Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something 
which will leave me unsatisfied."