Jamie Kirchick rightly faults the YDN for ignoring the controversy over Derrida's defense of de Man in its article on the former's death. While quotes like these are certainly interesting - "He was a very committed and rigorous champion of human rights and the rights of the oppressed," Kofman said. "It's sad the degree to which his work has been misunderstood, and I just hope that he's more appreciated than he has been."...Holquist said that Derrida's work at Yale left a division among students and professors between those who felt that Derrida eroded the tradition of close reading and textual analysis, which was a hallmark of the University, and those who felt that Derrida had in fact strengthened that tradition. - they're made both more relevant and more dubious by arguments like this: Some former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr. Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even using literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the Belgian scholar's newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic. "Borrowing Derrida's logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism," scoffed Peter Lennon, in a 1992 article for The Guardian. According to another critic, Mark Lilla, in a 1998 article in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Derrida's contortionist defense of his old friend left "the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you're sorry." Now I'm no expert on the controvery in question. And I'm not one to suggest that noxious views Derrida had or defended detract from the importance of studying him in an academic setting, any more than Plato's or Lincoln's or Elliot's make their work less relevant. But such moral failings should be part of the discussion - particularly when they illustrate limits or contradictions within an individual's moral universe - and part of the narrative. It makes for more honest, more relevant discourse. And it makes for better news too.