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REMEMBERING JACQUES DERRIDA
ADDITIONAL LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
If you would like to add your name to the NY Times / In Memoriam page, please register here. (It may take 24 hours before your name appears publicly.) If you have questions, please contact Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UC Irvine.
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To the New York Times.
Respect for thinking, for human beings, for language , respect even for what lies at the limit of our grasp, Jacques Derrida taught us to rigorously honor these things. His work was enthusiastically received in America because our need for them was so great. It is not too much to say that our future may depend upon them. It was with great sadness, then, that I read the obituary of Jacques Derrida in the NY Times sadness for the untimely loss of an irreplaceable thinker and a superb teacher, but also for the shallowness and distortion of the obituary the NY Times chose to print. With brazen disrespect and deep misunderstanding, Jonathan Kandell¹s obituary of Derrida has reinforced the current tone of simple-minded reaction and self- satisfaction that has seized American political culture today with deadly consequences
Suzanne Guerlac
Professor of French,
University of California at Berkeley
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