[lit-ideas] Re: Derrida -- "French thinker", the obituary read
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:25:20 +0100 (BST)
Excerpt of a recent letter to the Guardian from AC Grayling ...
"Your leader express a gratitude to Jacques Derrida for impugning the idea of
a literary "canon" (October 11). What deconstruction and its postmodern
allies, in theory, actually do is abandon standards of judgment, describing
these as tools of snobbery and exclusion, and thereby making it a criterion
of excellence that a work's author (his or her intentions, of course, aside)
has an appropriate gender, ethnicity, or geographical origin.
"The good reasons why these latter considerations should count in giving a
hearing to traditionally suppressed voices should not be confused with the
question of what constitutes the highest critical standards: it is part of
the damage done by Derrida and his kind that the latter have been replaced
almost wholesale by the former."
If D made a valuable contribution (as the obits seem to agree), what exactly
was it?
D
L
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