The French philosopher Jacques Derrida — the “father of deconstructionism” — passed away in October.

Obituaries and tributes sought to make sense of the work of a man whose influence on Western thought has been, unfortunately, quite significant — even if many people never heard of him. His disciples are certain Derrida made an invaluable contribution to humanity, even while their explanations of the contribution are less than clear. “He understood that official thought turns on rigorously exclusive oppositions: inside/outside, man/ woman, good/evil,” wrote Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University. “He loosened up such paranoid antitheses by the flair and brio of his writing, and in doing so, spoke up for the voiceless, from whose ranks he had emerged.”

I'm not certain who's in charge of “official thought,” but I suspect Eagleton is referring to what most people might call ordinary, common-sense thinking. Even the venerable Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy struggles to define deconstructionism: “(Derrida) tells us that deconstruction is neither an analytical nor a critical tool; neither a method, nor an operation, nor an act performed on a text by a subject; that it is, rather, a term that resists both definition and translation.”

To cut to the chase, Derrida taught that language is meaningless, communication impossible and life ultimately absurd. This is all the more amazing since Derrida dedicated most of his life to writing and teaching about deconstructionism. In books and lectures, he insisted that words, sentences and books cannot really say anything — or, if they do, they cannot say what the author thinks they say.

Illogical? Yes. Popular? Yes. Sadly, far too many people in the world of academia think deconstructionism is a most marvelous thing. One reason is that it allows ideologues to interpret any given text to mean anything they want it to say.

For my money, deconstructionism is just another form of gnosticism, or secret knowledge. A few enlightened elites are able to really understand what Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce or anyone else is really saying.

In an essay titled “The Meaninglessness of Meaning,” philosopher Roger Kimball denounced the “baneful ideas” of Derrida: “Deconstruction comes with a lifetime guarantee to render discussion of any subject completely unintelligible. It does this by linguistic subterfuge. One of the central slogans of deconstruction is ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ In other words … the meanings of words are completely arbitrary and, at bottom, reality is unknowable.”

Set aside the big word, and you'll recognize that we're surrounded by amateur deconstructionists who say, “We really can't know if something is true or not” or “That statement means something different for everyone” or “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Deconstructionism is aptly named because it seeks to deconstruct — that is, destroy — the nature and meaning of language.

When language is attacked, truth is attacked; when words are damaged, humanity is damaged. If words have no meaning, there is no meaning. Or, if there is, you cannot actually communicate it. Such thinking must culminate in nihilism and despair.

Derrida held that we inhabit “a world of signs without fault, without truth and without origin.” It's not surprising that he was an atheist who had little patience for religion or belief in the supernatural. Sadly, his ideas live on precisely because Derrida was wrong. Words do mean something, even when they are misused.

Carl E. Olson is co-author of The Da Vinci Hoax.