Does anyone still read this stuff?
Deconstruction is dead. Long live deconstruction. Huh? Derrida would be the first to appreciate the pairing of those two sentences and sentiments. As we know, one of Jackie's lifelong dreams was to get his readers to think of life and death as something other than a pair of polar opposites—i.e., binaries.
Why? Because life is in death, he taught. And death in life. Just as speech is in writing, and writing in speech.
But we digress. We'll stop beating around the Derridean bush and come out and say what it pains us (some of us loyalists, at least) to say: the critical school that Jackie built is, alas, no longer the cool kid at the lunch table.
But that doesn't mean the Deconstruction Game is over.
Critics started saying deconstruction's death was right around the corner almost as soon as Derrida's texts landed in the States. And they kept at it, always anticipating deconstruction's demise and delivering mean-spirited eulogies that proclaimed that good old, home-grown reading methods would rise again—thereby putting an end to Derridean pretention.
But this hostile takeover never happened. Things were, and are, as Derrida himself would point out, much more complicated than that. Even if critical theory is now in a "post-deconstructionist" phase, Daddy Derrida's influence on contemporary thinking—and contemporary close reading practices—is undeniable.
Indeed, we would argue that even the haters have borrowed from deconstruction's teachings. More importantly, though, the Derridean legacy lives on in the work of the Master's students, many of whom are still hard at work and still indisputably influential. See our "Big Players" section for more on heavy hitters like Gayatri Spivak and Avital Ronell.
And for "post-deconstructionist" theory that still keeps it real à la Derrida, check out the work of Derrida's fellow Frenchies: Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, and Bernard Stiegler. Wazzup.