i want to eat your nation-state

Thanks to Alicia for mentioning that Derrida died at the end of last week. I didn't do much news-surfing over the weekend so I hadn't heard. It's been interesting reading the obits. The NYTimes described him as "abstruse" in the headline of the obituary, which seems an unnecessary slam. I mean, when Stephen Hawking kicks, I doubt the Times will point out that almost no one who read it actually understood A Brief History of Time. Embarrassingly, I can't actually remember if I ever saw Derrida speak. I think I did, at a big seminar at NYU on Foucault. But that was a period in the mid-80s when I was seeing and doing (and drinking) lots of things and some of the details are fuzzy around the edges...