1) His Biography:
One of the most well-known and contentious philosophers of the second half of the 20th century was Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). His invention of literary “deconstruction,” which is both an interpretive strategy and a critique of Western metaphysics, makes him most famous. Derrida served as a professor at Paris’ Ecole Normale Supérieure from 1964 to 1984. From 1986 until his passing in 2004, he served as Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also contributed to the establishment of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris.
Derrida served as a visiting professor and lecturer at universities all over the world and was awarded honorary doctorates by Columbia University and the University of Cambridge, among other institutions. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages, and he wrote about fifty novels in addition to numerous essays and articles. He participated in numerous avant-garde art projects, was the subject of two documentaries, and frequently answered questions from the media.
On July 15, 1930, Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria, a small town near Algiers. In colonial Algeria, the Derridas enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence as a French-speaking Jewish family until the early 1940s, when the collaborationist Vichy regime encouraged the enforcement of anti-Semitic laws in Algeria. A system of quotas for Jewish students attending state-run institutions was one of these practises, and as a result, Derrida was expelled from Lycée de Ben Aknoun in 1942.
He would subsequently observe that this incident had a lasting impact on him. Derrida went back to school after France was freed, but it wasn’t until he discovered philosophy that he really got interested in learning again. Derrida travelled to France and matriculated at Lycée Louis-le-Grand before being accepted in 1952 to the famous Ecole normale supérieure. Derrida lost his first attempt at receiving the French state licence known as the aggrégation in philosophy, which guaranteed a lifetime teaching position at French universities. While a visiting scholar at Harvard in 1957, he wed psychotherapist Marguerite (Aucouturier), the love of his life.
Derrida was initially influenced by the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In fact, in 1962, he published his first significant work, a French translation and introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry”. When he delivered a speech titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” at a conference hosted by Johns Hopkins University in 1966—popularly known as the “Baltimore Conference”—he experienced his first significant success on a global scale. This essay served as both Derrida’s introduction to the American audience and Paul de Man, one of the founders of the prominent “Yale School” of literary criticism, whom Derrida would later become a close friend and a colleague to.
The literary “deconstruction” movement can be regarded to have begun in 1967, although it was clearly based on the philosophical deconstructions that philosopher Martin Heidegger had been engaging in for the previous 50 years. Three of Derrida’s most popular and influential books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology—were all released in that year. One can even argue that, with the inclusion of his book Dissemination, which was published in 1972, Derrida produced something akin to a canon of the fundamental ideas of deconstruction in the course of five years.
Derrida produced numerous essays on a variety of topics, including the structuralism of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, current thinkers Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, as well as classical authors Plato and Rousseau. These writings provided some of the earliest instances of “deconstructive” readings and established or popularised concepts like “the trace,” “the supplement,” différance, and the pharmakon.
Derrida’s fame on the global stage increased starting in 1968. However, it wasn’t until 1980 that he eventually completed his thèse d’état defence at the Sorbonne and earned the French higher education system’s final research qualification. The Jan Hus Association, which helped support intellectual dissidents in Czechoslovakia, was established the year after Derrida contributed to its founding. Derrida was detained and taken into custody after delivering a covert seminar in Prague under its auspices on false drug trafficking allegations. François Mittérand, the president of France, helped secure his release. Derrida was extremely distressed by the episode, as was the case with his run-in with Algeria’s anti-Semitic government, but it also contributed to his rise to international acclaim as a scholar.
Derrida relocated to the University of California, Irvine, in 1986. He soon learned that anti-Semitic rants by the now-deceased Paul de Man had appeared in Belgian newspapers during the Second World War. Deconstruction has long been criticised as being nihilistic or, at the very least, an uneasy ally of the progressive political convictions professed by many of its academic fans. Derrida wrote a defence of de Man that, for many of his detractors, confirmed this accusation.
From the late 1980s until his death, Derrida’s work overtly shifted toward ethical, political, and even religious issues. The Politics of Friendship and Rogues, two of the works he published in the late 1990s and early 2000s that explicitly addressed political issues, followed his first book, Force of Law. In pieces like On the Name and The Gift of Death, he also made an effort to discuss how deconstruction and religion—and Judaism in particular—relate to one another.
Until his passing on October 9, 2004, due to pancreatic cancer, Derrida continued to give talks, teach, and publish. Since then, notes from his final seminars have been compiled, translated, and published by his former students.
2) Main Works:
Writing and Difference:
The collection includes Michel Foucault’s essay Cogito and the History of Madness as a critique. It produced a schism between the two on March 4, 1963, during a symposium at the Collège philosophique that Foucault attended, and may have inspired him to write The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
Speech and Phenomena:
Husserl’s phenomenological project as a whole is discussed in regard to a significant distinction in Husserl’s theory of language in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and how this distinction links to his account of internal time consciousness in Derrida’s essay Speech and Phenomena. Key considerations of the concepts deconstruction and différance are also developed by Derrida.
Glas:
It mixes readings of Jean Genet’s personal writing with those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s intellectual writings. Its structure and subject matter make it “one of Derrida’s more enigmatic novels,” inviting consideration of the characteristics of writing and literary genre.
Specters of Marx:
At the 1993 “Whither Marxism?” conference on the subject that was conducted at the University of California, Riverside, it was initially delivered as a series of lectures. It is where the term “hauntology” originated.
Of Grammatology:
The book, which introduced the concept of deconstruction, argues that writing has mistakenly been seen as a derivation of speech throughout continental philosophy, particularly as philosophers engaged with linguistic and semiotic concepts, causing it to “fall” from the real “full presence” of speech and the independent act of writing.
3) His Legacy:
Derrida authored more than 40 books over his career in addition to thousands of essays and speeches. Philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, architecture, and political theory are only a few of the humanities and social sciences on which he had a significant impact.
In discussions of ontology, epistemology (especially with regard to social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language, his work continues to have a significant academic impact throughout the United States, continental Europe, South America, and all other nations where continental philosophy has been dominant. Because of his long-standing interest in language and his connections to notable literary critics from his time at Yale, Derrida is currently most influential in literary studies in the majority of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is predominant. He had an impact on music, art, art criticism, architecture (via deconstructionism), and other fields as well.
Derrida addressed ethical and political issues in his writing, particularly in his latter works. His 1967 publication Speech and Phenomena is regarded by some commentators as his most significant work. Others reference Margins of Philosophy (1972), Writing and Difference (1967), and Of Grammatology (1967). Numerous activists and political groups were impacted by these writings. His approach to philosophy and the renown complexity of his work made him a divisive public figure who rose to fame and influence