I had just gotten back from an afternoon’s errands (I needed groceries and a USB card reader, so that I could post these pictures of the newly-shorn Beatrice) when Alex IM’d me from Hawai’i to ask if I’d heard.
My first response came out of a lifetime of bad vaudeville with my dad — “I didn’t even know he was sick” — but it was true. I hadn’t any idea that Derrida had been struggling with pancreatic cancer.
My second thought was of Pierre Bourdieu’s death in 2002, and the melancholy tradition of Derrida’s writing obits for the other magi of poststructuralism. Who would mourn Derrida with the eloquence, insight, and bittersweet passion with which he lamented the deaths of his contemporaries?
Not I.
All I can say is this: when the confident assurances that it all really did make sense failed me, when the determined asseverations that those aren’t really problems wearied me, when sniping querulousness insisted that academic might was held by rational right — and he must not be admitted thereunto — I heard in Derrida’s patience and persistent advocacy of a truth and justice he could not lay claim to, a sign of understanding and grace that points across the theological and philosophical dissensions (and now the mortal bourne) that separate us, to a joyous wisdom known in circles holy and uncanny, that cannot but give glory to God.
can't think of a better place to have learned this sad news from than this
Posted by: tom matrullo at October 9, 2004 09:45 PMI must agree with Tom, for when I read about this at Wood s Lot, my first impulse was to come here. The world has too few geniuses, now one fewer. I wish I had begun to understand him while he lived so I could have followed his continmuing work. Now the best I'll be able to do is add him to some Nabokovian collection of smothered faded lepidoptera pinned to a specimen board in some corner of my none too orderly mind.
Posted by: fp at October 9, 2004 11:07 PM