Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida is one of the most important intellectual figures associated with poststructural and post-modern theory—although he never used the latter term—and is credited with creating the notion of deconstruction. His reassessments of classical metaphysics have posed a substantial challenge to philosophy, his readings of structuralist anthropology have forced serious reconsiderations of thinking in that area, and his discussions of language and literature have had a great impact on these and related fields. In his later life, Derrida increasingly turned his investigations to issues of ethics, justice, and the law, analyzing the legacy of Marxist thought in the wake of the Cold War.

His voluminous writings and broad consideration of questions of being in a secular world make him one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, one whose influence is still in the process of being assessed and whose work is difficult to summarize accurately. He has proven controversial for those engaging in questions of activism and social justice, as his assertion that there are no absolute or transcendental cultural values has challenged people attempting to assert the value of universal human rights. At the same time, his goal of creating an inclusive society to come, one that remains open to change in the future, presents his readers with ways of conceptualizing a world beyond the dichotomies of inside and outside, or inclusion and exclusion.

In 1930 Jacques Derrida was born to a family of Jewish descent in the French colony of Algeria. He grew up in El-Biar and was expelled from his lycée by a government eager to please the Vichy regime's anti-Semitic policies in France. His family later moved to France in order to help him pursue his education. Derrida succeeded in the French system, becoming a student and then lecturer at the elite École Normale Supérieure in 1952, where he studied under Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. He met his future wife Marguerite, a psychoanalyst, in 1953, and in 1957 they married in the United States and eventually had two sons. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida avoided military service by teaching soldiers' children French and English. After this period, Derrida became associated with the leftist avant-garde literary group Tel Quel while teaching at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure. He later dissociated himself from this group, maintaining a complicated position with their political leanings, as he did with most political movements. He finished his d'état (roughly equivalent to a doctoral thesis) in 1980, and became the director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He was a founder of the International College of Philosophy and held a number of visiting and permanent positions at universities in the United States, though he made his home in Paris. He received a number of honorary doctoral degrees and traveled widely prior to his death from pancreatic cancer in 2004.

Derrida emerged into the intellectual spotlight in the late 1960s with his publications “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”and Of Grammatology. “Structure, Sign, and Play”was first delivered as a lecture at Johns Hopkins University and then published in the volume Writing and Difference. The paper's initial purpose was to critique the vogue of structuralist theory, which was then dominant in much intellectual thought, and which sought the underlying structures that govern all social relations. In it, Derrida proposes a radical rupture against this thinking, asserting that no such underlying structures exist. These early works suggest the project of deconstruction, a notion derived from Martin Heidegger's use of the term destruction. Derrida uses the concept of deconstruction to dismantle the assumptions that are present in any text or discourse. He works from the premise that any center or metaphysically grounding notion—such as God, truth, or transcendence—can be demonstrated to be a false or incomplete explanation of how meaning functions. Deconstruction proposes to unsettle sedimented thought patterns. As such, it has the potential to liberate thought from its static or fixed forms and to allow new thinking to occur. Deconstruction is motivated by attempts to disrupt the hierarchical and dualistic modes of thought on which much of Western philosophy, as derived from Plato, is based. The supposed [Page 450]differences or oppositions between, for example, culture and nature can be shown to be artificial through this process, and the valuing of one over the other becomes an arbitrary judgment rather than a transcendent truth. Of Grammatology pursues such an investigation by deconstructing the opposition between writing and speech. Once a text relying on such an opposition is destabilized, its meaning opens up and become fluid, enabling alternative interpretations. As a result, deconstruction proposes a challenge to the notions of limits developed in analytic philosophy.

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