sweet effay

Derrida has died. Cue wailings from textual studies departments, of whatever ilk, across the world (except in France) and reams of facile obituaries written by people who don't really have a clue what he was on about.

Derrida is one of the few contemporary thinkers who has outlived my enthusiasm; for some dark, occult reason they tend to die when I start to take them really seriously. Just as I had finished Anti-Oedipus and was wondering what it all meant, Deleuze jumped out of the window. Burroughs popped his clogs as I was commencing a dissertation on him. I stick to dead people now to save on the wastage.

Nevertheless, there was a time when I was heavily into Derrida. I remember being taught about deconstruction, then actually reading Of Grammatology and discovering that everything I had been taught was wrong and that Derrida was both more interesting and a hell of a lot more complicated than I had been led to believe. I then made the error of thinking that what I should do was read mountains more Derrida in order to better understand the stuff that I'd read already. This I duly did, enjoying myself immensely but probably understanding less than half of it.

By this point I had achieved two things: Firstly, I had alienated myself from my philosophical peers who were convinced that I was an idiot to take this sort of stuff seriously and were getting more and more offended by my insistence that they were clearly wasting their time thinking about utilitarian models of biomedical ethics and the Institutional Theory of art. Secondly, I had realized that if I was ever going to manage to wrap my head round this stuff properly, I would have to do some groundwork by reading Heidegger, Freud, etc. etc. Consequently I decided to join the philosophical equivalent of a leper colony and headed off to Warwick.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I came to the conclusion that Derrida was a bit of a one-trick-pony (although it is a good trick) and he fell out of favour. It didn't help that the more he published the worse his work got. Still, it's safe to blame him for turning me into the over-educated, gibbering embarrassment to polite society that I am these days.