FOR fans it was the post structuralist equivalent of the papal Mass in the Phoenix Park when the high priest of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, came to Dublin last night. The crowd, estimated at more than 1,000, overflowed from a theatre in UCD to an adjacent chamber where the French superstar philosopher's lecture was relayed by, video.
Derrida's fashionableness has paled slightly since its height in the 1980s, when he became perhaps the first Johns Hopkins Philosophy Professor to have a pop song written in his honour, but he is still treated by many as an intellectual shaman, even if his writing consistently attempts to undermine such adulation.
During the 1960s and 1970s, he published a series of works which helped establish his name and a new school of philosophical thought, commonly referred to as deconstruction.
Derrida's deconstruction is a notoriously mercurial anti doctrine that encourages students of philosophy, and by extension thoughtful people in all walks of life, to suspect anything that is held to be an essential truth. It is an approach that is fertile ground for irony.
One of Derrida's best known application of his ideas concerns the contrast between speech and writing. He suggests that western philosophy has always considered the written as second best to the spoken word. Derrida maintains, however, that the notion that we are more likely to know what someone is really saying if they are standing in front of us is nonsense.
In his lecture, Derrida spoke impressively directly about the business of lying. True, some familiarity with Greek etymology, German philosophy and the writings of St Augustine would have been a help, but the performance was certainly geared to the general audience. "If the lie is not banned," Derrida observed, "humanity's social bond is ruined".
Afterwards, buoyant crowds gathered around the college smiling with what seemed to be joyous relief. Friends had told them to expect the worst, to expect to be irretrievably lost in a sea of signs within minutes. But in the end, it had been all right. Derrida's talk had been lucid, full of anecdotes, and much that sounded like engaged good sense. They had, they felt, understood what he was saying. Something of a mistake, M. Derrida might have commented.