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 |  Critics blasted his writings 
 as absurd (Agencies) |   
 Jacques Derrida, one of France's best-known philosophers and the 
 founder of the deconstructionist school, has died of cancer at the age of 
 74, his entourage said. 
  He had been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas in 2003. 
  Derrida's prolific writings, criticised 
 by some as obscure and nihilist 
 , argue that in literature -- but also in fields such as art, 
 music, architecture -- there are multiple meanings not necessarily 
 intended or even understood by the creator of the work. 
 "To 'deconstruct' is to take an idea, institution or value and 
 understand its mechanisms by removing the cement that makes it up," one 
 critic has said.  
 Born in Algeria in 1930 Derrida went to France's celebrated Ecole 
 Normale Superieur in 1952, then became an assistant professor at Harvard 
 in the United States and the Sorbonne in Paris.  
 Throughout his life he taught both in France and in the United States. 
  Among the influences on his thought were the German philosopher Martin 
 Heidegger and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. 
  "(Deconstruction) is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a 
 theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings," 
 according to John Lye of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. 
  "Its impact on literature is based in part on the fact that 
 deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process 
 rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and 
 conventions of writing," said Brock. 
  Deconstructivism is also known for the "intensity of its sense that 
 human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought 
 would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory 
 ways, so that certainty will always elude us." 
  Derrida was not always appreciated by fellow 
 academics. When Britain's Cambridge University planned to award him an 
 honorary degree in 1992 many staff protested and his writings were 
 denounced as "absurd doctrines 
 
 that 
 deny the distinction between reality and fiction." 
  In the end his degree was approved by 336 votes to 204. 
  In 1981 the Czech authorities put him in prison for several days 
 because of his public backing for the intellectuals who had published 
 Charter 77, calling for greater freedom. 
  Married to a psychoanalyst, he was a grandfather. He had a child with 
 Sylviane Agacinski, now married to former socialist leader Lionel Jospin, 
 of whom he was a political ally during the 1995 presidential election. 
  
  (Agencies)  |