Postcript on Derrida

As an anthropology student in a comp-lit dominated department, naturally I needed to read Derrida (luckily my mother, a Comp Lit professor, had a copy in the home). Anyone who went to college with me, and even people in outlying states, heard my voluble tirades against this overwrought con-artist.

His death (the New Republic entitled their obit/study "The Death of the Author") has brought all the penny-ante academists out of the woodwork (myself included) to sound educated by giving an opinon and interpretation of this Frog of One Color.

Today's times has an op-ed by a Williams professor (What Derrida Really Meant) who claims in his first paragraph:

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines.

Normally I was going to let Derrida's death slide into the inevitable obscurity but that first sentence got me a-raging all over again.

In the top 3 of the 20th Century, eh? I guess if we limit philosophy to things that have nothing to do with reality (and therefore leave out the scientists, psychologists, and statesmen that made more impact - leave out Einstein, Freud, Jung, Feynman) then we still have more important and influential thinkers.

I never thought I'd say this, but Foucault is far more important than Derrida ever dreamed (and did). And I hate Foucault.

Bertrand Russell? John Dewey? Santayana? I guess they didn't have much impact as Derrida... if you're a professor at Williams. But deconstructionism is an invalid philosophy, a philosophical gumdrop in a world that demands bread.

{2009 Pic update: Surreal Derrida from this philosopher pix site. Isn't the internet great!}