ILN EP 59: Jacque Derrida

Pat was feeling deconstructed so Ben bewitches him with the philosophy of influential French pompadour Jacques Derrida. Derrida is perhaps THE bad boy of postwar French philosophy. In calling out the trendy school of Structuralism dominating the intellectual landscape of 1950s Europe, this Algerian French Jew became the inadvertent poster boy for Postmodernism. His groundbreaking critical approach known as Deconstruction has since made every CompLit major of the past 40 years nut at the mention of it. Basically, he upended millennia of Western metaphysical tradition by denying the presence a fixed meaning behind texts, leaving Ben & Pat to pick up the shattered pieces.