The School of Humanities at the University of California, Irivine is hosting a website in honor of Jacques Derrida. At this website, you can register your name on a NY Times / In Memoriam page that has been established in order to testify to the lasting influence of Derrida's writing, teaching, and life.
As I mentioned in a previous post, in many of the obituaries for Derrida, including that written by Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times, Derrida's legacy has been deliberately distorted and maligned. The most typical distortion is some version of the claim that Derrida wanted to destroy the Western canon. In fact, Derrida's writings were intense and thorough engagements with some of the most important texts in the Western Canon, ranging from Plato's Phaedrus to Joyce's Ulysses to the Declaration of Independence.
By signing the letter, you can show your support for Derrida and send a message to the editors of the New York Times and the world that their dismissal of Derrida as an "abstruse theorist" is ignorant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment