I just found out that Jacques Derrida has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 74. I discovered this from reading AKMA this morning and his translation of Derrida’s remarks at the death of Bourdieu.

There goes one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth and the greatest thinker the twenty-first has seen so far.

Derrida’s death makes me think of the end of Samuel Beckett’s “Dante and the Lobster” from More Pricks Than Kicks, his first collection of short stories. Why? Because in undergrad for my senior thesis, I wrote a paper focusing almost entirely on the last several lines of this one short story, in which I wrestled with the text and with Derrida for 18 double-spaced, MLA-formatted pages. It was my first unravelling of the deconstruction already built in to the text. It was my first unravelling of Derrida’s thoughts in my own. His thoughts have had a palpable effect upon my life, and I think they will continue to do so until I join him in the ranks of the dead.

In any case, here’s the three lines (four sentences; actually five if you take note of the comma splice in Belacqua’s thoughts) from “Dante and the Lobster”:

She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live.

Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all.

It is not. (22)

Work Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “Dante and the Lobster.” More Pricks Than Kicks. New York: Grove P, 1972. 9-22.

UPDATE: Dear ill-informed newspeople,
Derrida is the father of deconstruction. The term deconstructionism is continually used by people who look at the word deconstruction—not comprehending what it is intended to represent in the least and who perhaps even think it a verb. They scratch their heads and think, Shouldn’t there be an -ism at the end of that word? No. There shouldn’t. Please correct your headline.

Thanks. //rant off

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