French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) is the admired yet controversial author of more than 30 books. He was educated at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied under and later taught alongside his friend Louis Althusser. His work has provoked lasting reassessments of key theoretical notions, especially those associated with ethics and politics, including the concepts of the human, of justice, responsibility, decision, and the institution.

Derrida's mode of inquiry begins with a question about the ideality of literature. Literature's ideality manifests a condition of repeatability across time and space that guarantees the exceptional singularity of a work or an author, while at the same time robbing it of assured meanings and contexts. This observation would have been of little consequence outside literary ...