Prior to discussing Derrida’s essay tomorrow, I wanted to share the wonderful obituary that Professor of Religion Mark Taylor (one of my early mentors at Williams College) wrote upon Derrida’s death in 2004:

Opinion | What Derrida Really Meant (Published 2004)

Op-Ed article by Prof Mark C Taylor says Jacques Derrida, who died last week, will be remembered as one of three most important philosophers of 20th century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger; says no thinker in last 100 years has had greater impact on people in more fields and different disciplines than Derrida, and no thinker has been more deeply misunderstood; explains what he meant by deconstruction; drawing (M)

Taylor nicely lays out the stakes of Derrida’s philosophy, often accused of undermining all foundations for ethics and moral judgment, as an enterprise deeply invested in moral and even religious questions. We see this in the very late essay (2002) that we’re reading together, where he goes “back to the beginning,” in a sense, troubling foundational moments in the mythic heritage of Western thought, asking us to rethink our ideas about what it means to be “human” and “animal” at once, what it means to use language (or be used by it), and what it means to “thicken,” as he says, the boundaries between concepts, rather than make defending them a life-or-death proposition.

All this is especially relevant this week, as we see colleges and universities turned upside-down, with college administrators ushering in police and expelling/suspending/encouraging arrest of students, staff, and faculty engaged in peaceful protest.