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.
http://www.csnsys.com/stanger/1Derrida.html