French thinker Derrida dies

FRANCE: The French intellectual Jacques Derrida, sometimes called the world's greatest living philosopher, has died in Paris at the age of 74.

Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year.

President Jacques Chirac said: "In him, France gave the world one of the greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time." But like other late 20th century French writers and philosophers who were difficult to understand, Derrida was better known in the US than in his own country. He taught for more than 50 years, in the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and at the Sorbonne, but also in US universities including Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and the University of California.

"My work was received more generously, more attentively [in the US]. I encountered less censorship, fewer barriers and conflicts there than in France," he told the French communist newspaper L'Humanité recently.

Derrida was born in El Biar, an affluent neighbourhood of Algiers. His parents were Jewish, pied-noir (of European origin) and left-wing.

He is credited with three concepts that entered common parlance: postmodernism, poststructuralism and deconstruction. The terms are often used sloppily by people who knew nothing of Derrida's theories. He complained that an article in the New York Times talked of the "deconstruction" of a rabbit in stew.

When he interviewed Derrida on television two years ago, the French writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert defined deconstruction as "taking an idea, an institution or a value and understanding its mechanisms by taking out the cement that holds it together". Derrida used literary criticism and psychoanalysis to "deconstruct" the work of classical philosophers. He argued that there are multiple meanings for every text.

French intellectuals are often masters of self-promotion, but Derrida refused to be photographed for decades and rarely appeared on television.

He was the last survivor of the "thinkers of '68", whose ideas influenced the student rebellion in May of that year. Others included Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, both of whom taught with Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure.

Though Derrida's work was not inherently political, he campaigned against the death penalty, apartheid in South Africa and for the rights of illegal immigrants. In 1982, he spent several days in a Czech prison after speaking out on behalf of the dissidents of Charter 77 in Prague.

Derrida lived for many years with the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, with whom he had a son. Agacinski is now married to Lionel Jospin, the former socialist prime minister.