Аннотация:When Jacques Derrida died in October 2004, the New York Times announced the death of the abstruse theorist with thinly veiled vitriol. Dismissive of Derrida's contribution to Western philosophy, the Times obituary character ized his work as fashionable and positioned Derrida himself as a divisive, though thoroughly charismatic, figure who shook up the humanities with deconstruction, a code word he was never able to adequately explain (Kandell A49). An early version of the death notice also took Derrida to task for the impen etrability of his writing, suggesting that his work amounted to just more evidence that an elite university education could be overpriced and overrated.1 Still more critical assessments followed. An embittered retrospective in the National Review Online complained that Derrida had built no new intellectual edifice, and made light of his philosophical legacy by openly joking about his death: French philosopher was so closely associated with nihilism and metaphysical absence that it's perhaps worth wondering if he ever lived at all (Miller and Molesky). The Times's Edward Rothstein wrote an equally acerbic appraisal in which he recalled one of Derrida's lectures at the University of Chicago as highfamtin entertainment and argued that the philosopher's appeal lay in his easy antiauthoritarianism, rather than in the intellectual rigor of his work (Bl). This is not to say that Derrida was without ardent supporters. Professors Samuel Weber and Kenneth Reinhard swiftly responded to the Times's obituary with a pub lic letter posted on a Web site called Remembering Derrida?and printed in an edited version in the Times itself?that condemned the article's scarcely concealed
