André Schiffrin (14 June 1935 – 1 December 2013)

"PARIS - Andre Schiffrin, the literary editor who gave readers Art Spiegelman, Michel Foucault and Studs Terkel before he was forced out of commercial publishing in a defining battle between profits and literature, has died in Paris. He was 78. Schiffrin, who died Sunday of pancreatic cancer, had sought out authors through his final days, dividing his time between New York and Paris as founding editor and editor at large of the non-profit New Press, said Ellen Adler, the imprint's publisher. Schiffrin founded the New Press after his highly public departure from Pantheon Books in 1990. At least four other Pantheon editors walked out with him, as did numerous authors.”
— Lori Hinnant, The Associated Press via Yahoo!
Read more…

“The demise of a force in American literary publishing, André Schiffrin, in Paris at age 78, offers a moment to reflect on how Big Publishing works, and exactly how deep is its true reverence for the cultural and intellectual values that it wheels out periodically to defend copyright extension, DRM, the Apple price-fixing cartel, and its other self-interested curbs on free expression. For the former chief editor of Pantheon Books was the focus of a storm over editorial integrity versus commercial pressures when he was fired by the company’s parent Random House in 1990, in a move which many authors and others dubbed corporate censorship.

From: Melville House

     Schriffrin’s father Jacques Schriffrin was the creator of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an imprint with immense cultural prestige in France. The Schriffrin family fled to New York when Vichy France’s anti-Jewish laws demanded his father’s dismissal from the company he founded. In 1962, Schriffrin joined Pantheon Books, already in the hands of Random House, as executive editor, and championed authors such as Marguerite Duras, Günter Grass, and Noam Chomsky. However, the imprint was concerned to use its revenues to finance less commercially successful books rather than to enrich its parent’s bottom line, and eventually there was a collision with Alberto Vitale, the new chairman of Random House, who asked Schriffrin to resign after he refused to cut either Pantheon’s list or its staff. Writers who demonstrated or spoke out against his dismissal included E.L. Doctorow, Studs Terkel, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”
— Paul St John Mackintosh, TeleRead
Read more…

Buy this book here...

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." — Albert Einstein

"When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma."

— Martha Nussbaum

"With [Jacques] Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, 'He says so and so,' he always says, 'You misunderstood me.' But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy.
     I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking in French. And I said, 'What the hell do you mean by that?' And he said, 'He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying. That’s the obscurantism part. And then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot." That’s the terrorism part.'
     And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes."
— John Searle (both quotes from Open Culture)
Read more…

"Derrida was the father of ‘deconstructionism,’ a critical practice that questions the foundation of Western thought by exploring the inherent instability present in language. From it ground-breaking conception in Derrida’s 1967 texts, 'Of Grammatology' and 'Writing and Difference,' deconstruction has heralded the death of the author by arguing that meaning has limitless layers of interpretation, not all viable at the conscious level.
     Throughout his life, Derrida wrote hundreds of books and essays that reread and deconstructed great philosophers such as Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche and ideals such as giving and forgiveness. In recent years, deconstruction has become the dominant discourse of academia and has seeped into pop-culture reference."
— Elyse Weingarten, EGO
Read more…