For meanings differ and defer

Perhaps in my last posting I quickly hopped over Derrida's death to complain about my undergraduate institution, but in all fairness today I feel compelled to praise one of my favorite academic personalities, who I learned about, of course, in the same room I denigrated in my last posting.

It is raining today. I wore sweatpants in solidarity with the weather, which was banging "stay in bed!" against the windowpane this morning. Unfortunately, the sweatpants have gone to my head, leaving me in a sort of sweatpants-like mindset that demanded I read every obituary about Derrida I could find on the internet instead of writing a challenging article about elephants that I assume will never be published.

As a person who writes, I know it is possible to execute a moderately successful article about a subject you don't attempt to understand by describing the controversy around it. This was the case in the majority of Derrida articles and obituaries that have been printed in the past few days, most of which devoted much more ink to the academic squabbling surrounding his various theories than the theories themselves. A number of publications brought up a New York Times interview where Derrida had refused to provide a definition to the concept of deconstruction, responding instead with the question, "Why don't you ask a physicist or a mathematician about difficulty?"

Without a small statuette in one's hand, it sounds silly to thank one person for the influence they have had on one's work, but I and many other people I know owe a debt to Derrida for teaching us about language. Rare is the day that I do not think about the concept of différance, not directly perhaps, but through the ability to articulate what exactly is wrong (or perhaps right) with the linguistic process behind a phrase like "the war on terror." It's what I wrote my first one-act play about, and he said it, there is nothing outside of text.

Having gone through a fair amount of obituaries, this one, appearing in the Guardian, was the most comprehensive:

"He argued that understanding something requires a grasp of the ways in which it relates to other things, and a capacity to recognise it on other occasions and in different contexts - which can never be exhaustively predicted. He coined the term "differance" ( différance in French, combining the meanings of difference and deferral) to characterise these aspects of understanding, and proposed that differance is the ur-phenomenon lying at the heart of language and thought, at work in all meaningful activities in a necessarily elusive and provisional way...

Derrida moved easily among French, English and German writers, and his favourites included James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Although his name is often coupled with the term "postmodernism" (sometimes with a suggestion of moral relativism), his allegiance was much more to the strenuous aesthetic experiments of the modernist writers. For him, the fact that moral values cannot be expressed as simple rules of conduct increased, rather than decreased, the importance of our ethical responsibilities."