Is Derrida

really dead?

Rod Liddle grapples with the life and meaning of the great deconstructionist iiiacques Derrida, the famous French philosopher, is 'dead'. But as there

is no straightforward, one-to-one relationship between the signifier

('dead') and the thing signified (the termination or otherwise of the actual person, M. Derrida), we cannot be entirely sure what has happened. We are faced instead with an endless multiplicity of truths, a string of infinite possibilities. I suppose it is entirely up to the reader to decide. It would be logocentric of us all to assume that Jakki's corporeal remains are in a state of decomposition simply because of the unbidden and puzzling presence, in our newspapers, of that signifier 'dead' in relation to the name 'Jacques Derrida' — a name which is, of course, itself merely a signifier bearing no straightforward relationship with the actual thing which we have come to call `Derrida'. The 'Jacques Derrida' which has 'died' was, or is, merely a refraction of a refraction of reality. So 'Jacques Derrida' might indeed be 'dead'. After all, he was getting on a bit and had been suffering from that thing which we have come to call 'cancer'. And then again, he might not be 'dead', whatever that is. Take your pick. We have to allow for the possibility that, contrary to the doctor's notes, which are a refraction of reality again, and contrary to the lamentations of family and friends and admirers and the newspaper obits and the undertaker's report, what has actually happened might well be this: somebody who isn't 'Jacques Derrida' hasn't 'died'. Go on, write that headline.

Hell, it's confusing stuff, isn't it? I bet it wasn't like this when a good old dependable British philosopher like Hume, or maybe Bertrand Russell, bit the dust. With them, one minute they were there, alive, without speech marks, and the next minute they were dead, devoid again of speech marks, and indeed breath. You know where you are with British philosophers and, up to a point, German philosophers. Except for Nietzsche, of course. And maybe Habermas. And Hegel.

Our problem comes, as ever, with the French. You think the 'death' of `Derrida' is philosophically problematic? Just wait until Jacques Lacan dies. Believe me, we won't know whether we're coming or going. Lacan makes Derrida look like Paul Gascoigne.

The thing I always loved about Derrida

was that all of those people on the Left who loved him never, ever read anything he wrote. This was about the only thing Derrida had in common with Marx: a huge fan club and a great lagoon of unreadness. University courses dedicated to their work; acre after acre of academic library stuffed to the gills with commentaries and revisions; thousands upon thousands of graduates pinning pictures of them on the mildewed walls of their bedsits. And only nine people in Europe actually read their published work. Well, maybe a few of your more intellectual Trots and commies read a couple of pages of Dos Kapital or, more likely, the Communist Manifesto or Grundrisse and then, faced with Derrida, managed most of the preface to Of Grammatology. Then, through the conduit of helpful five-page readers and crib notes they would bandy about terms and concepts like the 'negation of the negation' (from Marx) and of course 'clifferance' (from Jakki) and start to Change The World. (Philosophers have hitherto attempted to explain the world: the point, however, is to change it. Remember?)

Reader: I read the stuff. Solely out of adolescent intellectual one-upmanship. There were many other more pleasurable things to be doing when you were 17. I wished I'd done them more and Derrida less, frankly. Although Derrida at least was interesting, from time to time. I'm not sure you can say the same thing of Marx.

Pleasingly, Derrida became championed by the leading proponents of late 1970s popular culture. He starred in a strange film during which he insisted that the person at whom the camera was pointing was not, actually, Jacques Derrida. I can't remember the name of the film but I do recall that the soundtrack was not by Dmitri Tiomkin or even Ennio Morricone, but provided instead by a chap playing the drums on a roof to the accompaniment of the Radio Four Shipping News.

Derrida got into the charts, too. The briefly cool Welsh blue-eyed soul band Scritti Politti recorded a song called 'Jacques Derrida'. Its first few lines went like this:

I'm in love with Jacques Derrida, Read a page and know what I needta Take apart

My baby's heart.

And after a while Jacques began to spread his wings. There is only so far that you can go with lit. crit., after all. So he moved into architecture. 'There was a deconstructionist house which looked pretty weird and had al l the central heating on the outside. Why had nobody thought of that before'? Genius.

So that's all the funny stuff, the stuff that makes us think the French are suckers where yer bloody intellectuals are concerned. But while the stuff for which Jacques Derrida will be remembered — the death of the author, the absence of such a thing as a single inviolable truth, and an embracing of the beautiful complexity of the linguistic process — may lead to apparent philosophical absurdities, occasional hilarity and the sort of moronic and predictable leader column in the Daily Telegraph which greeted his death, we should not give him up so lightly. Because at the heart of Derrida's philosophy was a laudable commitment to making mischief and, more than this, a fervent belief in the notion of doubt, something which is intrinsic to our conception of democracy. Without doubt, there's no democracy.

Nor was Jacques Derrida necessarily a man of the Left. Sure, along with his sulphurous Francophone fellow travellers — Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault — he considered himself a man of the Left. But by his own lights we are not obliged to take him at his word. Certainly there is nothing very left-wing about the people from whom Derrida drew his philosophical inspiration. Sigmund Freud was a bourgeois liberal. Friedrich Nietzsche, I think we have to concede, was somewhat right-of-centre. And Martin Heidegger, whom Derrida adored and was later forced to become an apologist for, cheerfully supported the Belgian Nazi party. I mean, come on, be honest. As mentors go, it's hardly William Morris, Gramsci and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, is it?

At heart, Derrida was for the individual, and his brilliance was to question everything in which we believe. So, Jakki, rest in peace. If you are Jacques Derrida. And if you are dead.