Jacques Derrida 1930 – 2004

Jacques Derrida was a 20th-century French philosopher, born in French Algeria, who developed the influential approach to philosophical, literary, and political analysis known as deconstruction. His major works of the 1960s, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, argued that Western philosophy has long privileged speech over writing and presence over difference, and that careful reading of canonical texts reveals the instability of these oppositions. His later work addressed ethics, justice, hospitality, friendship, sovereignty, and the politics of mourning. He held a long teaching post at the Ecole Normale Superieure and was a frequent visitor to American universities. His thought has been formative for post-structuralism, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and contemporary continental philosophy.