LETTER BY YVE-ALAIN BOIS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

October 10, 2004

To the Editor

Topping the usually Philistine relationship of the Times to just about everything academic, and its habit of entrusting the composition of obituaries to overt opponents of the deceased supposed to be memorialized, the article by a Jonathan Kandell on Jacques Derrida, who died this past Friday, reaches a peak of populist anti-intellectualism--not to speak of the countless distortions it contains--that I thought only possible in a Murdoch publication.

Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophical enterprise, and give at least some ideas about his trajectory--from phenomenology to structuralism to, yes, their “deconstruction”--Mr. Kandell sets the tone right away, already dismissing Derrida as an “Abstruse Theorist” in the title of his hatchet job. After a caricatural description of deconstruction as “the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction,” and a not-so-subtle underscoring that Derrida was French (and thus anti-American, if suppose: one wonders if Mr. Kandell works for the Bush administration), Mr. Kandell spouts one derogatory term after the other. Structuralism is a “slippery philosophy,” Derrida’s explanations are “murky,” his books “off-putting to the uninitiated,” and so on.

The lowest point of the article involves Derrida’s long contribution to a symposium organized by Paul de Man’s many admirers, following the discovery, shortly after his death, that as a young man, between the age of 20 and 23, from 1940 to 1943, de Man had published literary columns in several Belgium journals controlled by the German occupiers. After telling us that de Man “contributed numerous pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic articles” (a flat lie, as anyone who has done his or her home work knows--the homework of reading de Man’s complete war-time essays,­ anthologized and republished by the organizers of the symposium I just mentioned), here is what Mr. Kandell has to say: “In defending his dead colleague, Mr. Derrida, a Jew, was understood by some people to be condoning Mr. De Man’s anti-Semitism.” “Was understood by some people”: sounds like a “news” broadcast on Fox TV. But Mr. Kandell does not stop there, he even quotes one of his fellow journalists arguing that “borrowing Derrida’s logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-semitism.”

The obituary is full of filth, and I do not have the energy to rebut it point by point. Derrida would have: he always hoped against hope that stupidity could be countered by patient analysis, that, in the end, philosophers would win against the boeotians--even if it meant that philosophers, from Socrates on, often had to die during this age-long battle.

One thing is certain, the Times failed to its mission of informing its readers and instead of recapitulating Derrida’s formidable accomplishment, it confirms this opinion of a “journalism professor” quoted by Mr. Kandell according to which “many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise--if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it.” The only thing is: Mr. Kandell is anything but unmalicious.

Yve-Alain Bois
Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Professor of Modern Art
Chair, Department of History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University