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ADDITIONAL LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES If you would like to add your name to the 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 Editor: At a time when one of our political parties celebrates the virtues of black and white thinking and derides anything even slightly more complex, it was troubling to read your obituary of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Instead of the kind of obituary of a major thinker
one expects from your paper--a knowledgeable and objective
consideration of the person's work--this read more like the all too familiar celebration of ignorance. Derrida's writing has helped several generations of people to imagine, not an abstruse moral relativism, but ultimately a more ethical way of thinking. It is worrisome that you do not seem to know that and were willing to settle for the most cliched, uninformed views of this important philosopher's contributions. |
