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.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was the founding figure of deconstruction and one of the most influential and contested philosophers of the late twentieth century. Born in Algiers to a Sephardic Jewish family, expelled from school under the Vichy racial laws, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure with Foucault and Althusser and held positions at the École Normale, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the University of California Irvine, and elsewhere.

Derrida's three 1967 books — Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference — established deconstruction as a sustained philosophical practice of reading. The technique exposes how privileged terms in philosophical texts depend on what they exclude; how speech depends on writing, presence on absence, the same on the other. The aim is not to refute philosophical positions but to show that they cannot fully say what they take themselves to say.

Derrida's later work extended into ethics (the gift, hospitality, friendship), politics (the question of Europe, the spectres of Marx, sovereignty), and religion (negative theology, the messianic). His influence on literary theory, legal theory, architecture, and the broader humanities was enormous; his reception in analytic philosophy was typically hostile. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2004. The publication of his unpublished seminars and lectures, beginning posthumously, has continued to extend his philosophical legacy.