Why They Hate Derrida
I've been mulling over the recent death of Jacques Derrida, and contemplating why it is that the conservatives I know are so hostile towards the ideas he developed during his lifetime. Some of it certainly is their discomfort with his dismissal of moral absolutism, which they are very open about. Some of it, one suspects, is just envy: Derrida makes them feel stupid. They just don't get what he's on about, and they are very bad at admitting that they don't know everything. And don't take that as an arrogant allusion to my own presumed brilliance. Everything I know about Derrida I have learned from others. I just happen to be fortunate enough to have an academic philosopher in my family. But I digress. I believe that at the real heart of why the American conservatives hate Derrida is that not only is he so on to them he makes them look like half-wits (which they most assuredly are not, except perhaps relative to him), but embracing his teachings provides people with a way out of the linguistic net they have been casting over our society in the course of the last thirty-plus years. In Derrida is the seed of the Conservatives' destruction. No wonder they were eager to bury him years before he died.
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