As Frankfurt School theory was being absorbed by the intelligentsia, another idea was gaining traction that would seem to conflict with it: deconstruction. The philosophical basis for deconstruction went back to Nietzsche’s idea of radical subjectivity. Thrown into this cooking pot to create a stew were two quarts of Marx, a teaspoon of Freud and a few tablespoons from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The result may not have been inedible, but it was certainly unreadable.
We ought to stop here and note something relevant. Nearly all of the philosophers we have talked of to this point have manifested aspects of the Big Four (irritable, disagreeable, melancholy and unattractive to the opposite sex.) In most cases they are emblematic of this. That is screamingly obvious in pictures. Hegel was terrifying. Drawings show his bulging eyes, his pallid flesh, his inept comb-over, and the bags under his eyes. These last are the dimensions of Greenland. Heidegger has the appearance of a trapped mole rat. The joint sex appeal of Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas is that of a lame marsupial. Sartre looked like a dwarf child molester. And then we have the main proponent of deconstruction, the Frenchman Jacques Derrida.
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