Cancer kills leading French philosopher Derrida

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 9, 2004

PARIS – World-renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, a charismatic philosopher who founded the school known as deconstructionism, has died, the French president’s office said Saturday. He was 74.

Derrida died at a Paris hospital of pancreatic cancer, French media reported, quoting friends and admirers.

The snowy-haired French intellectual taught, and thought, on both sides of the Atlantic, and his works were translated around the world.

Provocative and as difficult to define as his favorite subject – deconstruction – Derrida was a leading intellectual for decades. He is considered the modern-day French thinker best known internationally.

“With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time,” President Jacques Chirac said, calling Derrida a “citizen of the world.”

Born to a Jewish family on July 15, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria, then part of France, Derrida wrote hundreds of books and essays. His reputation was launched with two 1967 publications in which he laid out basic ideas, “Writing and Difference” and “Of Grammatology.” Among other works were the 1972 “Margins of Philosophy” and, more recently, “Specters of Marx” (1993).

Derrida was known as the father of deconstructionism, a branch of critical thought or analysis developed in the late 1960s and applied to literature, linguistics, philosophy, law and architecture.

Derrida focused his work on language, showing that it has multiple layers and thus multiple meanings or interpretations, challenging the notion that speech is a direct form of communication or even that the author of a text is the author of its meaning.

Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida’s philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to Western values.

The deconstructionist approach has remained controversial, with detractors even proclaiming the movement dead. So divisive were Derrida’s ideas that Cambridge University’s plan to award him an honorary degree in 1992 was forced to a vote, which he won.

Critics accused Derrida of nihilism, which he adamantly denied.

“Deconstruction is on the side of ‘yes,’ an affirmation of life,” Derrida said in an August interview with the daily Le Monde.