The deconstructionist is dead; long live deconstruction!

Jacques Derrida, who asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, is dead at 74. His theories broke down everything from literary texts to television commercials into codes that must be broken down by the reader in search for meaning.

Deconstruction is difficult to understand and mostly misunderstood that the man himself said that if deconstruction existed at all, “it takes place as the experience of the impossible.”

The Algerian born Derrida, who wasn’t exactly the most brilliant of scholars as a young man—flunking exams and being denied acceptance to university, also once dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player.

Had he believed in reincarnation or parallel universes, he would have written books about rats and alienation and disenchantment and died in a car crash. But that life was already lived and patented, by another Algerian born Frenchman of all things, so had to go out and invent something hip and trendy for jargon spewing Comparative Literature majors everywhere.