This weekend gave support to the notion that deaths come in threes. Christopher Reeve, whose most heroic role came off-screen as he battled paralysis, succumbed to a heart attack, as did Ken Caminiti, who won the National League Most Valuable Player Award before fighting a losing battle against addiction. Perhaps more famous abroad than in America was Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, who died of cancer.

Derrida is discussed at length in Intellectual Morons. He described deconstuctionism, a subset of postmodernism that he launched in the 1960s, as "criticism [that] aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licenses the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay.'" This spawned unmeasured mischeif in the academy, with sex-obsessed disciples of Derrida portraying Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer as subconscious homosexuals and Beethoven's Ninth as a "rape" symphony.

Postmodernists often speak of the social construction of truth--one went so far as to write a book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. So, not long after Derrida passed I wondered how long it would take some weirdo postmodernist (I hate to be redundant) to argue that Derrida's death was an illusion. None has to my knowledge, but I did see this article on FrontPageMag that notes Derrida's passing, adding: "Well, at least that is the subjective unproven conclusion we have, since, after all, how do we REALLY know that death and cancer exist?"

Derrida's influence was great in academia. Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals, for instance, pointed out that between 1995 and 2000 scholarly journals cited Derrida more than every other "public intellectual" save Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault. That Derrida's deconstructionism became widespread among intellectuals says more about intellectuals than it does about deconstructionism.

I regret Derrida's death. I welcome the death of deconstructionism.

I think some of Derrida's writings are quite interesting, particularly his earlier work. Some of "On Grammatology", such as his musings on whether thoughts express themselves in an internal language, is absolutely fascinating. The fact that others misuse Derrida's system can't really be held against the man himself. I say all this, by the way, as someone who generally dislikes post-modernism and thinks the academic left is a serious threat to American democracy.

At least take some credit ye americans! it was one of your own--albeit a jew...does flynn count non-israeli jews?--who outed Huck Finn WAY back in 1948: "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!" I'm sure a quack check of your right sites will verify the horror oh horror of a national icon's querying. Hence the outrage over Anne of P.E.I.'s only natural resource unnaturally sharing a bed with her dark haired friend. Let me guess, you think Christina Rossetti's Goblin Marker is about sisters!