Pointy-heads do battle

I learned of the death of superstar French philosopher Jacques Derrida by email from an old uni mate schooled in the rational disciplines of science and medicine.

"So Jacques Derrida is dead," he wrote. "But what is death? Indeed, what is what?"

The former literary theory student in me had to play the game: "Death is not dearth although the difference between the two words, or signifiers, is also part of its meaning. The death of Derrida is also a dearth of Derrida and every other meaning which is like death but different."

The official announcement of Derrida's death on October 8 at age 74 was made by the office of French President Jacques Chirac.

Derrida is one of the few late 20th-century philosophers people outside academia are likely to have heard of, but it's hard to imagine Dubya or Blair giving a radical theorist, cultural commentator and activist such eminence.

Around the world, news of the celebrity thinker's demise wasn't always being treated with such reverence. Like former students, still harbouring grudges over the wilful obscurity of Derrida's texts, some obituary writers couldn't resist a poke at the philosopher notorious for such illuminating sound bites as: "Thinking is what we already know that we have not yet begun."

The august Times, for example, ran a wicked parody of Derrida's infamously abstruse and contradictory writing style, titled "Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida?"

The jokes, the satire and the pig philosophy were predictable. So, too, was divided opinion over the philosopher's worth. With his celebrity status (he packed the Town Hall when he visited Auckland in 1999), movie-star tan and silver hair, Derrida was always controversial in intellectual circles, a fact he fuelled with enigmatic and evasive answers to attempts to get him to explicate his theories.

Less predictable was the length and fury of the pitched battle being waged between fans and foes over his significance.

Was Derrida the saviour of the humanities, under pressure to perform as a research discipline, or a villain out to erode the foundations of Western civilisation? It's a slugfest still raging in newspapers, learned publications and websites such as Arts and Letters Daily.

In contrast to the academic's reputation for cool and collected debate, the combatants are not pulling any punches.

If you've heard or used - misused, the experts would say - the word "deconstruction", you've been influenced by Derrida, whose radical ideas about the elusive nature of language, meaning and truth have influenced fields as diverse as anthropology, architecture and law.

To devotees, deconstruction was an exciting new way to pull apart authoritarian or ideological thinking. To detractors it was nothing less than nihilism and an attempt to destroy Western thought and its glorious heritage from the Age of Reason.

Among the first to have a go was British journalist Johann Hari. The King's College, Cambridge, philosophy graduate (double first), obviously still in recovery from Derrida's writings, launched an attack in the Independent, "Why I won't be mourning Jacques Derrida."

He called the Frenchman "the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought - language and reason."

The column earned him buckets of scorn from academia, including the kind of dumb, knee-jerk response the Ivory Tower usually prides itself on not having.

"Dear Mr Hari, you are an idiot," wrote a professor from Goldsmith's College, University of London.

When pointy-heads fight it's not pretty, but when politicians enter the fray things turn truly ugly.

The Guardian newspaper asked "key thinkers" in Britain what they knew of Derrida's work. Most memorable was the response from Denis MacShane, Minister for Europe.

"The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a Minister for Europe can only use when speaking French."

There you have it in a nutshell. Froggy faddishness and frivolity vs good old Anglo common sense.

The Francophobia isn't confined to cross-Channel relations. Two academics to weigh in with scathing obituaries in the National Review were the authors of a work entitled "Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France".

It's the kind of prejudicial reaction that has got Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University and one of the most accessible writers in the field, hopping mad. He leapt to Derrida's defence with a stinging tirade in the Guardian against his compatriots' "bemused and bone-headed" responses.

"English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words of French philosophers are uttered," he wrote.

The bitterly opposed camps number not only the Anglo and Francophiles but also the the liberal vs conservative, appalled by Derrida's claim there is no such thing as authorship, finite meaning, transcendent moral authority or absolute truth.

Nowhere are the divisions more bitter than within academe itself, between English departments and humanities and philosophers and scientists who pride themselves on rationality.

"He [Derrida] is difficult to summarise because it's nonsense," huffed British philosopher Roger Scruton in the Guardian.

In Arts and Letters Daily, Brian Leiter, philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Austin, claims: "American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy's history."

To give the Derrida deriders their due, you don't have to look far among the welter of tributes on the internet to find examples of the kind of pernicious, "anything goes" influence they complain of.

A Derrida acolyte describes the first, giddy days of her conversion. "In typically nerdy fashion, I went overboard. I began speaking in tongues in my classes, wrote papers in opaque, outlandish language. I Derrida'd everything, wrote papers on semiotics and Zen koan ... "

It may prove an unfortunate irony that the man who interpreted binary oppositions - truth, falsity, darkness and light, man, woman, self and other - as a hallmark of rigid, ideological thinking, should leave a legacy so firmly divided.

Much of Derrida's writing is devoted to exposing how such oppositions were also perversely connected and he might have enjoyed the schizophrenic response to his obituary in the New York Times.

While fans were grossly offended at the mention of their hero's abstruseness and murky explanations of his own theories, the foes read the same text as hagiography of the worst kind.

The best story about Derrida is probably apocryphal. An audience member at a Derrida lecture in Kansas confronted the master with a scene from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends finally meet the Wizard, who is all-powerful until Toto the dog pulls away the curtain to reveal a very small man.

"Professor Derrida, are you like that?" the accuser asked. Derrida paused, then replied: "You mean like the dog?"

In all the commentaries on his death, there has been a dearth of the sense of humour which some assert the soccer-mad, soap opera-loving philosopher possessed in abundance. How else could you explain a man who described his own invention thus: "Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

If Derrida's theories are correct, there is unlikely to be a resolution to the problem of his legacy any time soon. For if meaning, as he asserted, is a slippery, temporal process, constantly modified by what comes next and therefore always deferred, no one is going to get the last word.

The deep thinker as pop star

Only rarely do philosophers escape from the rarefied world of the universities into public notice. But Frenchman Jacques Derrida broke the mould. When he died this year the controversy about his ideas and his status became more fierce than ever.

He had achieved almost pop-star status, packing halls around the world, including Auckland. His detractors argue that his philosophy, expressed in mischievously obscure prose, is not much more profound than pop music, but it has certainly helped produce a set of beliefs with an influence far outside academic philosophy.

Building on a foundation laid by the linguist Saussure, and others such as Lacan and Barthes, he argued that meaning could not exist independently of language.

A traditional reader believes language can express ideas without changing them, and the author is the source of its meaning. Derrida challenged this assumption and the Western cultural belief that language is a clear way to communicate.