Uneasy Rhetoric

Deconstruction icon Derrida dies. (BBC)

The father of literary uncertainty, the cause of frustration, anger, and militance among so many literary critics, has met the one part of the text for which all meaning becomes ultimately meaningless: the end.

Update: This excellent thread at MemeFirst, ironically pays respect to Derrida and his “philosophies” through some satire and a bit of turning Derrida’s text onto himself in a way that smacks of intentionalism.

One commenter suggests that [i]nsertion of the author himself into the text, of course, is a classic postmodern jape, intended to raise questions of unreliable narration.

Meanwhile another commenter quotes Derrida in the hope that the author was intending to tell us something about his own text:

“Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given’, one can say, by death. It is the same gift, the same source, one could say the same goodness and the same law. It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible.” -from Derrida’s Donner la mort (The Gift of Death)