Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Jacques Derrida, French intellectual, died on October 8th 2004, aged 74

  “IN HIM France gave the world one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our times,” announced Jacques Chirac, the French president, on the day after Jacques Derrida’s death. Mr Derrida himself disagreed with pretty much everything anyone said about him; but he may have let that encomium pass. The inventor of “deconstruction” – an ill-defined habit of dismantling texts by revealing their assumptions and contradictions – was indeed, and unfortunately, one of the most cited modern scholars in the humanities.

  He was also the most controversial. In 1992 a proposal to award him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University caused such howls that the university was forced to put the matter to a ballot – the first time this had happened in 30 years. Amid charges that Mr Derrida’s work was absurd, vapid and pernicious, the degree was awarded in the end, by 336 votes to 204.

  The academy is often fractious, but this was different. It is not that Mr Derrida’s views, or his arguments for them, were unusually contentious. There were no arguments, nor really any views either. He would have been the first to admit this. He not only contradicted himself, over and over again, but vehemently resisted any attempt to clarify his ideas. “A critique of what I do”, he said, “is indeed impossible.”

  There has always been a market for obscurantism. Socrates railed against the followers of Heraclitus of Ephesus for much the same reasons that Mr Derrida’s critics berate his unfortunate disciples:

  If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you’re transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You’ll never get anywhere with any of them.

  Subjected to his weak puns (“logical phallusies” was a famous example), bombastic rhetoric and illogical ramblings, an open-minded reader might suspect Mr Derrida of charlatanism. That would be going too far, however. He was a sincere and learned man, if a confused one, who offered some academics and students just what they were looking for.

  Mr Derrida’s father was a salesman of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Born in a suburb of Algiers, Jacques was expelled from his school at the age of 12 because of the Vichy government’s racial laws. With some difficulty, in 1952 he succeeded in entering the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and attended the lectures of Michel Foucault. He began to lecture at the Ecole Normale in 1964. Two years later, at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he laid the foundations of his reputation in America with a bold new way to approach literary texts and lay bare their ideological presuppositions. Three books followed in 1967, including “Of Grammatology” and “Writing and Difference”. A radical star was born.

  Mr Derrida’s style of deconstruction flowered especially in American departments of comparative literature, where it became interwoven with Marxism, feminism and anti-colonialism. Although by the early 1980s French academics

  had largely tired of trying to make sense of him, America’s teachers of literature increasingly embraced Mr Derrida. Armed with an impenetrable new vocabulary, and without having to master any rigorous thought, they could masquerade as social, political and philosophical critics. Mr Derrida always denied any responsibility for the undisciplined nihilism of his imitators, who gave the strong impression that deconstructionism had somehow succeeded in undermining, or even in refuting, the notion of objective truth. But his work could not easily be interpreted in any other way.

  A crisis came in 1987. The New York Times revealed that Paul de Man, a friend of Mr Derrida’s and one of America’s leading deconstructionists, had written anti-Semitic articles for a pro-Nazi Belgian newspaper in 1940–42. Coincidentally, also in 1987, evidence began to emerge of the hidden Nazi past of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had been a major influence on Mr Derrida. Mr Derrida’s response was disastrous. He used deconstructionist techniques to defend the two men, laying down a fog of convoluted rhetoric in a doomed attempt to exonerate them. This fed straight into the hands of his critics, who had always argued that the playfulevasiveness of deconstruction masked its moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The New York Review of Books quipped that deconstruction means never having to say you’re sorry.

  Mr Derrida also pursued far worthier causes. He fought for the rights of Algerian immigrants in France, opposed apartheid and campaigned for Czech dissidents. As his influence waned, his fame grew. Abandoning his earlier reticence, he submitted to interviews and photographs. He confessed to disliking Woody Allen’s comedy, “Deconstructing Harry”. The books continued to flow (80 volumes in all) as his concerns moved away from literary and philosophical texts to ethical and political subjects, but they were no easier to follow. In his final years he became increasingly concerned with religion, and some theologians started to show interest in his work. God help them.

  In our obituary of Jacques Derrida, we gave “logical phallusies” as an example of his weak puns. We were wrong; it was not his coinage. But “phallogocentrique” was (see, if you will, “Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche”, 1978). Our apologies.

  The Duke of Devonshire

  Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, died on May 3rd 2004, aged 84

  THE village of Edensor in Derbyshire is a pretty place. Its houses are eccentric, with Tudor chimneys and Italian doorways, and they sit around a spacious green planted with laburnum trees. The church boasts both a tower and spire, and it is here that Andrew Cavendish now lies along with many of his forebears. Edensor was moved and rebuilt by the sixth duke in the 19th century because, sitting as it used to on a ridge east of Chatsworth, it spoiled the view. It now blends seamlessly into the wide sweep of parkland that leads down to the great house, and knows its place: a tiny settlement amid 35,000 acres of moorland, woodland, meadows and gardens, all owned by one family.

  The 11th duke could never quite believe he possessed all this. Delightedly, he would count his Chatsworth assets: 297 rooms, 112 fireplaces, 56 loos, 2,084 lightbulbs. The beauty of the house, stacked with books, paintings and sculpture collected by the Cavendishes for 450 years, constantly enthralled him. Chatsworth, he once remarked, was his idea of heaven; that, and drinking tea in the hall at Brooks’s Club in St James’s.

  Nor was this all. He owned another 40,000 acres, including Bolton Abbey, the most romantic ruin in Yorkshire; Lismore Castle in Ireland; a chunk of the West End and a goodly extent of Eastbourne, a shabbily genteel resort on the Sussex coast. Each year the duke would spend a week there in his own hotel, the Cavendish, relishing the end-of-the-pier shows and the distant blare of military bands.

  If he never took any of this for granted, strolling through life with an air of the utmost diffidence and happiness, it was because he had never expected it. As the second son of the 10th duke, he was told he would inherit nothing. He was vaguely preparing himself for a career in publishing when his elder brother was killed in action, in 1944, and everything was his.

  Having stumbled by sheer luck into the Cavendish inheritance, he then almost lost it again. His father’s sudden death in 1950 saddled him with almost £7m in death duties, or 80% of the estate. Drastic measures were necessary. Hardwick Hall, another ravishing Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, was sold to the National Trust. Several Rembrandts, Van Dycks and Raphaels went to galleries, and the Caxton and Shakespeare first folios to America. The duke himself was driven to working as a minister of state in the government of his uncle, Harold Macmillan: a reward, he supposed, for having given him some good shooting. Around 150 staff had to be dismissed, including 15 gardeners. It was touch and go whether the magnificent cascades could be kept flowing and the topiary trimmed.

  At this desperate point the duke took a leaf from the book of his hero and exemplar, the sixth duke. William Spencer Cavendish had been a member of the Whig party in the early 19th century: a liberal reformer and anti-slavery campaigner who, though a grandee to his fi
ngertips, empathised with the common man. He eventually opened Chatsworth to the public every day, especially making sure that the great fountain was working for them to see. Whatever new wings he built, or new sculptures he acquired in Italy, he believed should be shared with the gawping crowd.

  The 11th duke, pushed on by his “bossy” Mitford duchess, decided to do the same. Chatsworth was made over to an independent charitable trust, with the family renting their quarters, and the doors were flung open to visitors. Every possible means of making money was employed, as long as it was consonant with dignity; the duke had no wish to make his house a “circus”, like Woburn or Beaulieu. A shop was opened, the first of its kind, selling branded cushions, teapotsand hand cream; a farm shop offered Stilton and game. A hotel was built, then a conference centre. The duke happily attached his name to a hamper, retailing at £499, containing sloe gin, sausages and chutney. By 2002, Chatsworth was making a profit and bringing in 500,000 visitors a year.

  The taxman, you could argue, had forced him to this pass. But the duke was also devoted to a far more ancient concept, noblesse oblige. Having been so fortunate, and having done nothing, as he said, to deserve it, it was incumbent on him to be generous to others. He opened his vast “back garden” to ramblers, where his grandfather had used his gamekeepers to send them packing. In 1991 he founded the Polite Society after an aged taxi-driver, pressing his hand, told him how good it felt to be thanked. He was active in all kinds of charities, and helped to save the Chesterfield football team from extinction.

  Those with no stomach for feudalism remained unimpressed. They muttered about his fortune (£1.6 billion, by some estimates), his gaming and horse-racing, his pretty young mistresses, his self-declared “dimness”, and all the usual failings of the English upper classes. They were scandalised by his pledge to break the law if fox-hunting was banned, and by his patronage of the Europhobic UK Independence Party. But his Chatsworth staff, more than 600 of them, all of whom felt he had known and respected them, put on their uniforms and lined the road that led through the deer park to Edensor.

  Diana, Princess of Wales

  Diana Frances Spencer, Princess of Wales, died on August 31st 1997, aged 36

  It was easy to get caught up in the cult of Diana, which became as strong for the Princess of Wales as it was for her mythological Roman namesake. When she was married in 1981 The Economist itself gushed, “God save the next queen.” Now the cult is immeasurably greater than it was 16 years ago. Books await to be written, perhaps are already being written, about how a 19-year-old kindergarten helper became the most famous woman in the world, and was seen at her death to be an icon of her age. But whatever puzzles the writer may encounter, there will be no shortage of material to ponder over.

  One of the oddities of many of the articles written about Diana during the past week is that they dwell on her search for privacy. True, she had no privacy, but she appeared content to be constantly on public view. After Lenin died the Soviet government employed researchers to make a record of every day of his life. The reporters and photographers who made Diana their career did the same, and more efficiently. She mostly smiled on their dog-like attention and occasionally threw them a bone which would turn up in a tabloid next day as a “world exclusive”.

  Her friends were privy to her more intimate thoughts and these too would become public property. The princess went on television to give answers to the most searching questions about her life in a bbc programme that was sold around the world. As a product, Diana never palled. There was always some event to keep her public keen, a new lover, a new cause, some painful disclosure about her physical and mental health. Privacy is a luxury still available to the rich, albeit with difficulty. Princess Diana preferred to display her infinite variety.

  Despite her humble job looking after tinies, Diana Frances Spencer was born a lady. Her father was an earl, her mother the daughter of a baron. For centuries the Spencer family had been close to the monarchy, holding whimsically named posts: a grandmother was a woman of the bedchamber. When Prince Charles was looking for a bride fit to be a queen, Diana was high on his list. Like the Roman goddess, she was apparently a virgin, a rare qualification among the prince’s girlfriends. She was pretty and, as shown in many of the pictures subsequently taken of her, she could look beautiful in a sympathetic setting. She had received little formal education, but that did not seem to matter. Her youth suggested that she could be eased without difficulty into the royal mould. The Queen Mother, who had never given the monarchy a moment’s anxiety since she married into the royal family in 1923 (and is now a hale 97), was the model, and for a while she chaperoned Diana. The princess did her duty, providing two splendid sons, one of whom is in line to be king if he and the monarchy survive. She went along with the formalities expected of a prince’s wife, becoming, for example, colonel-in-chief of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and a patron of numerous charities long cherished by the royals. But her fancy was for more offbeat causes, aids sufferers, lepers and, most recently, land-mine victims.

  She gave them valuable, if brief, publicity, and her support made all the more impact by being unusual coming from a royal. She was up to date. The National Marriage Guidance Council changed its name to the snazzier Relate, with the princess as its patron. The prince also had his favoured causes, concern for the environment, the preservation of architectural standards, but a picture of Diana cuddling a handicapped child was what caught the eye. According to Diana’s accounts, she found the prince’s family boring and offhand. Although the prince was a mere 13 years older than she, Diana saw him as an old fogey, approaching middle age. Worse, Charles kept up his friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, an old flame. “There were three of us in the marriage,” she said famously on the bbc.

  The British public was slowly eased into the knowledge that what had been seen as a fairytale marriage had been deeply miserable. A separation was announced in 1992. On that television programme in 1995 Diana hinted that the prince might never become king. As for herself, she would like to be “a queen of people’s hearts”. The put-upon real queen had had enough. She told the couple to get divorced as soon as possible. Diana fought her corner and, after long and sometimes bitter negotiations partly over money, the couple were divorced in 1996. Diana remained a princess but was no longer the future queen, no longer even “her royal highness”. One of her first actions was to drop the patronage of some 100 charities.

  Still, in the public eye, Diana could do nothing mean. Indeed, her seeming lapses, her adulteries, her conspicuous extravagance, seemed only to support

  the view that she was a real person. The manner of her death, in a speeding car crashed by a drunken driver, with her latest lover by her side, could merely have been shocking. For millions it confirmed that Diana the goddess was a victim of “fate”, whatever that may mean.

  Manuel Elizalde

  Manuel Elizalde, protector of minorities, died on May 3rd 1997, aged 60

  When Manuel Elizalde announced the discovery of a tribe in the Philippines uncorrupted by civilisation, he touched a sympathetic chord among the ordinary corrupted millions who sometimes allow themselves to muse on the appeal of the simple life. Here, it seemed, was the modern version of Rousseau’s noble savage, a people who lived in harmony, had no word for war, and whose modest needs were provided by the rain forest which had sheltered them from contact with the outside world. Their basic food was the wild yam, a root vegetable, flavoured with grubs and small fish, with wild bananas for pudding. Their homes were caves. They made fire by rubbing sticks together. They ran naked in this Eden or dressed in clothes made of leaves.

  Immediately, there was scepticism from experts doubtful about any surviving human dodos. How could the Tasaday, as the tribe called itself, have remained undiscovered until 1971 in a country of more than 40m people which was a battleground in the second world war? Mr Elizalde came under deep suspicion. He was from one of the rich families that in the Marcos era ran the Philippines, a
nd, largely, still do. After leaving Harvard he had gained notoriety in Manila newspapers as a playboy. Were the Tasaday people an elaborate hoax?

  It would be tidy to close the story there, as one more example of a mischievous anthropological joke, comparable to the Piltdown man, the “missing link” in human development found in 1912 and not exposed as a forgery until 1953. However, the Tasaday discovery is not a Piltdown. Whatever controversy may surround the Tasaday, Mr Elizalde did not invent the tribe.

  When Manuel Elizalde first spoke publicly of the Tasaday he had put aside his wild days. He served for a time as president of his family’s vast industrial conglomerate – steel, fibres, sugar, mining, broadcasting – and later became head of the government department responsible for minorities in the Philippines. Some years before Mr Elizalde disclosed the whereabouts of the Tasaday he had been told of the tribe by a trader from another tribe in the region.

  Mr Elizalde was personally interested in minorities: he and his wife had adopted 50 orphaned children from minority families. He knew from experience of surveying his family’s estates that parts of the Philippines were almost impenetrable. Since 1952 three Japanese soldiers had been holed up in the jungle in the Lubang islands, unaware that the war had ended five years earlier, and shooting at anyone who approached (the last one gave up in 1972). But the Tasaday homeland in Cotabato, in the impoverished deep south of the Philippines, was coming under the eye of the loggers. Mr Elizalde decided to make contact with the tribe and give it protection. “It was us or the lumbermen,” he recalled.

  When Mr Elizalde arrived with his party in a helicopter he was treated like a god. An ancestor of the Tasaday had predicted that one day someone “who loves us” would come from the outside world. Mr Elizalde did his godlike best, getting President Marcos to make the jungle inhabited by the tribe a reserve barred