JACQUES DERRIDA, 74 No, the bad boy of international letters ...

IDA, 74 No, the bad boy of international letters and philosophy didn't just up and deconstruct; he died quietly of pancreatic cancer last week in France.

Born into a Jewish family in El-Biar, Algeria in 1930, Derrida grew up amid the last generation of Sephardi culture and tradition before moving across the Mediterranean to Paris in 1949 and subsequently attending the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. Following his graduation, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne and Harvard University. For the rest of his life Derrida would split his academic commitments on both sides of the Atlantic.

Nineteen sixty-seven saw the publication of two landmark texts: Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology. These volumes-followed up in the ensuing decades with Margins of Philosophy and Specters of Marx-founded the philosophical school, or non-school, of deconstruction, and established their author as its guiding light. Based on the methodology (or lack thereof) of Freudian psychoanalysis, on the Marxist theory of history, the philosophy of the late Martin Heidegger as well as engagement with such modernist literary works as Camus' novels, Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the opus of Marcel Proust, Derrida's work proposed a fundamental rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western thought. Ignoring any idea in favor of (or as inadequate to) the language in which it was expressed, and embarking with the assumption that in any work of art or thought there are multiple meanings not necessarily intended or understood by the work's creator, Derrida's philosophy developed into a text-focused incursion into previously unconscious associations that eventually abolished the idea of separate disciplines such as literature and philosophy, politics and history.

Indeed, Deconstruction was the first philosophy that was also a theory of philosophy, a study directed at the language in which we communicate as having exceptional predominance over the material communicated.

Though Derrida had his detractors from early on, those who confused the necessary difficulty of his statements for obtuseness, he found a welcoming home for his thought not only in academia but also in the work of numerous post-WWII writers of fiction and poetry, notably his friend Edward Jabes and the philosopher Emanuel Levinas.

The last few years saw Derrida become an increasingly political animal with the publication of a set of essays on September 11, The "Concept" of September 11 and Hoodlum, and his vociferous attacks in the French media on the ongoing war in Iraq. After discussing current American policy in a recent interview with Le Monde, Derrida admitted to being "dangerously ill."

"Learning to live should also mean learning to die, taking into account and accepting the absolute nature of mortality with neither resurrection nor redemption."

He added, "I have not learned to accept death."