Jonathan Gurwitz: Deconstruction is death of common sense







Web Posted: 10/17/2004 12:00 AM CDT











San Antonio Express-News







The protagonist of Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal work "Thus Spake
Zarathustra" declares, "God is dead." But it was God, or at least nature,
that had the final say in the matter.







A clever epigram puts the issue in stark relief.







Nietzsche: "God is dead."







God: "Nietzsche is dead."







Nietzsche predicted that the decline in traditional beliefs, such as the
belief in God, would undermine the cultural foundations of morality and set
mankind on an inevitable journey toward relativism and nihilism.







After Nietzsche's death, one of the great captains of that journey was
Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-born French philosopher whose signal
contribution to the relativistic effort was deconstruction, the theory that
no ultimate truth or meaning can be found in a text or work of art.







Jacques Derrida is dead. Maybe.







The object here is not to make light of Derrida's death from a painful
disease. Rather, it is to demonstrate how such transcendent events can be
rendered meaningless by his own theory.







News reports suggest that Derrida succumbed to cancer this month in Paris.
Yet those reports may have multiple meanings. Our traditional way of
understanding an obituary may be based on false assumptions. The fact that
reporters have declared Derrida to be dead may not mean that Derrida is, in
fact, dead.







All this may sound like a nonsensical game of semantics to the average
person. Which only demonstrates that the average person has more common
sense than the great minds of academia seized by the whimsical notion that,
for instance, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, "all men are created equal," he
quite probably meant precisely the opposite.







Deconstruction has led to some fanciful efforts, stripping meaning from the
likes of Plato and Shakespeare and adding it to indolent streams of free
verse consciousness.







The prospect that one's own words could be meaningless was of particular
interest to Paul de Man, a Yale University professor who was
deconstruction's most ardent advocate in the United States. In 1987, four
years after de Man's death, the rediscovery of pro-Nazi,
pro-collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles de Man had written as a young
man in Nazi-occupied Belgium created a deconstructive scandal.







That's the attraction, and the artifice, of deconstruction. On the one hand,
it turns literature - and literary criticism - into an intellectual
free-for-all where any notion, no matter how outlandish, has merit. In fact,
the more outlandish, and the more peppered with sexual references and
progressive political causes, the better.







On the other hand, it means - as Derrida demonstrated in his defense of de
Man - that what you write or say ultimately has no meaning.







In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal set out to demonstrate the intellectual
vacuousness of deconstruction by submitting an article intentionally devoid
of any meaning to the journal Social Text. In writing "Transgressing the
Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," he
sought to test whether a serious academic journal would "publish an article
liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered
the editors' ideological preconceptions."







Sokal's opus sparkled with deconstructive-sounding gems: "These criteria,
admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science:
they liberate human beings from the tyranny of 'absolute truth' and
'objective reality,' but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human
beings."







The editors of Social Text couldn't help themselves. "Transgressing the
Boundaries" went to print in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue. Course
descriptions in the humanities, literature and sociology - to say nothing of
gender and race studies - at almost any university reveal the extent to
which such deconstructive language is ascendant in academia.







Few intellectual movements have done more to unhinge words from meaning,
ideas from philosophical foundations and art from artistry than Derrida's
ghastly creation. In 1992, Cambridge University proposed giving Derrida an
honorary degree. Twenty professors of philosophy objected that
"semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship
is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree
in a distinguished university." In a vote of the full faculty, Derrida's
supporters prevailed, 336-204.







Even Sigmund Freud, another contributor to the relativistic cause, is
attributed with saying, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."







Jacques Derrida is dead. Deconstruction, however, lives on, carrying forward
the insidious tendency toward relativism and nihilism that Nietzsche
presaged more than a century ago.







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