To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
– Jacques Derrida
Er, yeah, whatever Jack…
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Samizdata quote of the dayOctober 9th, 2004 |
 6 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Let us sincerely hope that he’s not pretending to have died in hopes that he can somehow keep on existing.
But en Francais, it is so more meaningful.
Oh you poor anglos… quelle angst.
Coming soon. Derrida deconstructs his obituary: “I’m no deader than, well, that parrot over there.”
It is not accidental that the utterly arid and meaningless condition of philosophy, along with many of the other classical subjects, in Western culture coincides with the pre-eminence of deconstruction in the academy.
The founders and acolytes of this obscenity are mediocre intellects who disguised saying nothing by using as many impenetrable terms as possible, and then ridiculing anyone who dared to say it was hard to figure out what they were going on about.
A survey of the intellectual condition of Western academia is reminiscent of those aerial films taken by photo recon planes flying over Germany after WW2—mile after mile of blasted out ruins and piles of rubble.
I have often found it revealing that the same professors who have spent decades teaching that nothing really means anything are the same ones who lament to anyone who will listen that the world is not paying any attention to them. The obvious question is—Why should anyone bother?
Last night on the bus, another Samizdatista and I overheard some poor loser weeping into his mobile phone about Derrida’s death. “He was, like, totally my main theorist,” the weeper moaned. If laughing at him was wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I remember people trying to decipher the deep meanings of Jon Anderson’s lyrics for Yes from the 1970s.
It wasn’t for another twenty years that he admitted they were nothing but stream-of-consiousness gibberish.
Derrida reminds me very much of Jon Anderson. But could he sing?