Storied thinker dazzles at UCI; Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the founder of literary deconstruction, believes there's no one meaning to any text

DATE                  05/09/93
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               METRO
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  B01
STORY LENGTH          46 INCHES
HEADLINE              Storied thinker dazzles at UCI  //    LITERATURE: 
                         Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the founder of literary 
                         deconstruction, believes there's no one meaning to 
                         any text.
BYLINE/CREDIT         DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         OC:COLLEGES:FACULTY


     Twice a week for five weeks in the spring, giants and would-be giants of philosophy and literary criticism make a pilgrimage to a dank lecture hall in a University of California, Irvine, basement.
     They come -- and sit in the wide-eyed rapture of comprehension (or incomprehension) -- because behind an ugly metal table, wearing  a wrinkled linen jacket, fracturing the English language accidentally and on purpose, Jacques Derrida lets them in on his
  secrets.
     Derrida--pronounced Dare-ee-DAH --is brilliant, and often as enigmatic as a sphinx. A philosopher and literary critic, he catapulted to fame nearly 30 years ago on the strength of his theory of literary deconstruction.
     A firebrand Frenchman, he changed the way academia looks at the very act of reading by insisting that there is no one meaning to any text, that paradoxes abound in the use of words and that no two readers ever see exactly the same thing.
     His brief annual presence at UCI, though costly -- he commands a salary of more than $34,000 -- is priceless to his admirers.
"Of all academic humanists, he's arguably the most influential in the world," said humanities Dean Spencer Olin.
     At one recent lecture, Derrida handed out a poem -- a particularly confusing and cryptic poem, full of mysterious
allusions. And in the middle of his discourse, filled with explorations of the concept of testimony, of translation, of
etymology, of the limits of knowledge and understanding, Derrida stopped.
     "Why do you think I won't even attempt to explain this poem?" he asked his audience. "This I will explain."
     Classic Derrida.

  Parallels to Columbo

     Derrida resembles Peter Falk, the actor who plays Columbo. Bushy hair, thick brows, a swarthy, expressive face, wrinkled (though stylish) clothes.
     Columbo with a French accent and a pipe.
     But the similarity goes beyond the physical.
     Take away the opening scene of your typical Columbo movie, where a very specific murder is committed, and the last scene, where Columbo wraps it all up nice and tight, and what you have left is a man of unquenchable curiosity.
     "Just one more question" is Columbo's motto -- and, similarly, Derrida's.
     "I would accept that," Derrida said in an interview, mulling the parallel out loud.
     "The one who asks questions."
     He paused.
     "You're not describing a detective, but a philosopher."

  Colleagues were shocked

     Derrida is now 63. Deconstruction, while not in vogue as it was a decade ago, is still the pursuit of countless graduate students.
     And while his home base remains the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, seven years ago Derrida switched
  American pied-a-terre.
     He let upstart UCI woo him from Yale in a move that at once shocked many of his colleagues and put UCI on the literary map--with a big star.
     "In some disciplines, new universities do at least as well as the old, famous universities," Derrida said with a smile.
     His faithful devotees -- including 24 graduate students taking  his seminar, and about 100 other people, including undergraduates, UCI colleagues and professors and graduate students from all over the nation -- attend all 10 of his public lectures each year.
     And they can't say enough about the man.
     In fact, sometimes they can't say anything at all -- at least anything comprehensible to a layman.
     Others speak with great care in describing the seductive appeal of a Derrida lecture.
     "It's very confusing," said John Ronan, a senior English major.
  "No, that's not the right word. It's very -- let me think of the word for it -- it's very intense. ... It's not easily determined, whatever it is ... which to me is an allure more than anything else."

  `Questions of responsibilities`

     Derrida's lecture series for this year was Part Two of a multiyear sequence titled "Questions of Responsibilities." This year's subtitle was "Testimony."
     "I always teach what I'm currently working on," Derrida said.
     Translating from notes written in French, Derrida recently discussed a poem by Paul Celan that seems to be about the Auschwitz death camp.
     Its last stanza reads (in translation from the German): "No one/ bears witness for the/ witness."
     In part, Derrida's lecture was not unlike that of a more traditional literature professor. Reading some lines of the poem aloud, he then explored possible meanings and possible literary references, from Shakespeare to texts in Sanskrit.
     But when Derrida had built up a head of steam, he launched into a series of tangential arguments that were virtually impossible for the uninitiated to follow. Arguments about the limits of testimony, about how testimony cannot be proof, about what bearing witness for another can and cannot mean.
     The only noise coming from Derrida's disciples, even during his most trying utterances, is the sound of scribbling. Some students try to dash down every word, their fountain pens ceaselessly moving. Others attempt to make meticulous outlines. Some just stare.

  Praise and criticism

     As the founder of deconstruction--something like being the first person to split an atom -- Derrida has been lavishly praised by some, and venomously criticized by others.
     The most common accusation is that deconstruction is amoral--that saying that nothing means anything flies in the face of Western, Judeo-Christian morality.
     Just last month, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani lashed out at Derrida for fostering a "stylishly nihilistic view of the world" that is ideal for Nazis who deny that the Holocaust took place.
     But Derrida insists that his theories do not undermine morality.
     He does not, he said, argue that there is no such thing as meaning. He just thinks anything can be the jumping-off point for further inquiry.
     And some skeptics believe that Derrida's "paradoxes" are just wordplay, just semantics, and themselves mean nothing.
     "How can you say semantics mean nothing?" he asked. "It's the way we live, the way we understand the other. If you don't pay attention to what words mean, what would happen?"

  Addressing problems

     When he describes his approach, Derrida does not use the word deconstruction. He said all he does is "address problems" -- ideally by examining them without preconceived notions.
     Perhaps the greatest value of his methodology, he said, is that it can help people better understand issues in daily life.
     In a recent discussion with his graduate students, for instance, Rodney King's beating came up.
     They explored how the "testimony" of the video camera transformed what some would say is an almost everyday occurrence into an international incident.
     Deconstruction also can be used to shed light on what appear to be incomprehensible contradictions in politics and current events.
     For example, some people see Rodney King as a symbol of victimization, while others see him as a criminal.
     How can different people have looked at the same video but reached such different conclusions?
     To someone such as Derrida, that is a perfect example of how people can come away from the same "text" with wildly different "readings" because of the suppositions they started with.
     It doesn't mean one group is right and another is wrong--although Derrida said with a chuckle that he certainly doesn't see
  King as a criminal. It's just how things are.

 

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