Jacques Derrida, who died this week, was reviled as much as revered for his philosophy and ethics, writes Brian Boyd.
Was there anyone who understood him? Arguably the greatest philosopher of his generation, Jacques Derrida, who died last week, enjoyed the rare privilege of being known above and beyond his immediate academic circle largely thanks to his theory of deconstruction. It remains a theory that is as provocative and as difficult to define as the man himself. This mild-mannered, Algerian-born, France-based philosopher, whose only real ambition in life was to become a professional footballer, changed irrevocably the notion that language could express ideas without changing them.
Derrida's "deconstruction" was an unpicking of the way text is put together in order to reveal its hidden meanings. At its heart is the notion each text contains layers of meanings which have grown up through cultural and historical processes. Traditional systems of language and thought are believed to be "natural" whereas there are in fact mere historico-political constructs which can and do operate as oppressive power systems. To see clearly, we must develop tools (deconstructionism) to reveal a number of differing meanings. Absolutes must be excluded because they limit freedom.
For Derrida, any text (whether it be a piece of music, book, a work of art etc;) will eventually contradict itself and by examining these contradictions, you can spot manipulations of the "reader". For deconstructionists, no text has a single or key meaning, instead all statements produce an explosion of varied meanings - all of which are equally valid.
To further complicate matters, what the reader brought to the text, in terms of prior/assumed knowledge could be as important as any "meaning" the text itself possessed; similarly, what was left out of the text could be as important as what was left in.
It's a theory probably best appreciated when you consider how a feminist or a Marxist deconstruction of a text can offer up entirely new meanings of a work.
Any single meaning, therefore, is never stable or fixed; the reading of the text is dependent on multiple contexts. To some, Derrida's work was essentially nihilistic in character and because he was either unwilling, or unable, to define deconstructionism with any real precision, the term has come to be interpreted in many contradictory ways.
It was a theory that was to bring him as much derision as acclaim. Along with his near-contemporaries, Barthes, Lacan and Foucault, there was a bit of a "rebel yell" about Derrida, as he railed against orthodox approaches to literature and philosophy. Sometimes to be located in the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism, Derrida resisted any classification - was proudly obscurantist and had such a penetrative set of schemata that the best his (many) critics could accuse him of was wilful nihilism.
It's a rare thing indeed for a philosopher to be as revered as much as reviled but Derrida - the subject of films, cartoons and, perhaps most notably, a song by Scritti Politti - made a massive contribution to not just language and philosophy but also ethics and aesthetics. Not forgetting his influence on the all-important post-structuralist dinner-party set.
There was a political element to his work in that deconstructionsim was also used to uncover ideological biases - whether of gender, race, economics or culture - or mere traditional assumptions. The premise here is that much of human history, in trying to understand and define "reality", has led to various forms of domination and inequality - as in the phrase: "history is written by the winners".
It is arguable that Derrida's background provoked his main theory. As an Algerian Jew writing in France at a time of fascism and later Stalinism, Derrida would have been acutely aware of the danger of beliefs that divide the world into simple binary categories of good/bad; right/wrong.
What most annoyed his critics, however, was that he seemed to undermine any possibility of truth or absolute value. By insisting that no truth or absolute value could be known with certainty, Derrida appeared to rule out the possibility of any moral judgment and thus found himself in a place where scepticism and relativism reigned supreme.
Significantly, his most recent work focused on how we live in an age where wars are prosecuted by people who believe, for certain, that God, or "right" is on their side. Belief not tempered by doubt was mortal danger for Derrida and he viewed the desire for political/religious simplicity - whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish - as something which could tear the world apart.
But again the question that always followed him was that of an alternative.
Was it unbelief or a different kind of belief? It's at this level that critics pounced but Derrida replied, in his own gnomic way, that wisdom is knowing what we do not know.
So divisive were his ideas that when he was nominated for an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, a number of professors at the university signed a letter of objection which claimed that his writings were "absurd doctrines that deny the distinction between reality and fiction".
A quiet and gracious man, he once pleaded that nothing appear in print about him other than the texts he had written - and he refused, for the most part, to be photographed.
When it was humorously pointed out to him that his simplistic opposition between the public and the private could not survive his own philosophical scrutiny, he began to allow photographs and even appeared in a documentary film about his life.
Although he once said the "least bad definition" of deconstructionism was that it was "a certain experience of the impossible", perhaps his most lasting legacy is that as a philosopher he didn't reinterpret - he uninterpreted. He drilled away happily at the supporting structures of Western thought and civilisation, all the time warning that everyone who claimed to get the point was missing the point.