Here are some apt and just rebuttals of the inanities published on the death of Jacques Derrida. I quote, by way of example, Judith Butler's letter:
Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most. This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it. Why would the NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is most urgently required?
Interesting to note the number of British blogs who, always eager to point out supposed examples of 'anti-Americanism', were entirely unperturbed by the puerile anti-French (and anti-Continental) sneering so thinly veiled in many of these intellectually illiterate and cynical pieces of journalistic ephemera.