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Article: Obituary - Jacques Derrida.(Jacques Derrida, French intellectual)(Obituary)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- October 23, 2004
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Jacques Derrida, French intellectual, died on October 8th, aged 74
"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 ...