Facing a backlash from scholars worldwide, UC Irvine says it will drop a lawsuit against the widow and children of professor and philosopher Jacques Derrida, the acclaimed founder of the intellectual movement called deconstruction.
Instead, UCI officials said they had resumed negotiations with Derrida's family over control of his groundbreaking scholarly work.
"We feel confident that in the very near future this issue will be resolved in a manner that satisfies the Derrida family," said UCI spokeswoman Christine Byrd.
Derrida, a Frenchman who taught part time at UCI from 1986 to 2003, developed an influential and bewildering intellectual discipline that questions the notion of absolute truth.
In November, UCI sued Derrida's estate in federal court, saying his family had refused to relinquish manuscripts and correspondence that Derrida promised in writing to donate to the university.
The dispute began brewing shortly before Derrida's death three years ago at age 74.
Until that time, Derrida had slowly been turning over lecture manuscripts, journals and other materials to UCI's special collections library under an agreement he signed in 1990.
UCI had spent more than $500,000 on the project, installing two copy machines at Derrida's house near Paris and hiring French-speaking graduate students to help catalog the documents, according to the lawsuit.
But in 2004, Derrida sent a letter to UCI's then-chancellor, Ralph Cicerone, threatening to withdraw permission for scholars to photocopy or quote material from the archives, a move that would have rendered the papers virtually useless, said Peggy Kamuf, a friend of the Derrida family and chairwoman of USC's comparative literature department.
Derrida was "quite unhappy with some things the University of California was doing," Kamuf said, adding that she couldn't discuss details except to say it didn't involve Derrida's own relationship with the university.
After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France, Kamuf said.
"Irvine is not exactly the center of the world," Kamuf said, so the family requested duplicate archives to assure wider scholarly access to the philosopher's work.
Derrida's estate also sought changes in how UCI managed the papers, said Jackie Dooley, who heads the school's special collections and archives.
