Jacques Derrida

摘要

"In Him France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our times," announced Jacques Chirac, the French president, on the day after Jacques Derrida's death. Mr Derrida himself disagreed with pretty much everything anyone said about him; but he may have let that encomium pass. The inventor of "deconstruction"-an ill-defined habit of dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions-was indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities. He was also the most controversial. In 1992 a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University caused such howls that the university was forced to put the matter to a ballot-the first time this had happened in 30 years. Amid charges that Mr Derrida's work was absurd, vapid and pernicious, the degree was awarded in the end, by 336 votes to 204.