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10/16/2004: "What is death, after all, but another subjective experience?"

Those of you interested in obtuse French philosophers may be aware that Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, died this week. Or did he?

Is Derrida dead? A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality

Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists' objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science–among them, Derrida's own existence–which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has profound implications for the content of future postmodern and liberatory science of mortality. Is God dead?

It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal’s inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge, thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple "either/or" structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither "either/or" nor "both/and" nor even "neither/nor" while at the same time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us.

As Andy at Rest Across the River points out, this unsigned article has the tenor of a former graduate student getting revenge. Wonderful! (From the Times of London, and thanks to Andy for the link.)