Derrida attended schools in France and entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1949.
College/University
Gallery of Jacques Derrida
1976
45 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
Jacques attended the Ecole Normale Superior, receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy Degree in 1953, a Master's degree in Ethnology in 1954, an Aggregation of Philosophy in 1956, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967.
Career
Gallery of Jacques Derrida
2004
Jacques Derrida
Gallery of Jacques Derrida
1985
French writer and philosopher Jacques Derrida at a UNESCO press conference on prisoners in South Africa, which took place in Paris, France on October 11, 1985.
Jacques attended the Ecole Normale Superior, receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy Degree in 1953, a Master's degree in Ethnology in 1954, an Aggregation of Philosophy in 1956, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967.
French writer and philosopher Jacques Derrida at a UNESCO press conference on prisoners in South Africa, which took place in Paris, France on October 11, 1985.
(Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program...)
Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing, new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways.
(In Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida situates the phi...)
In Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida situates the philosophy of language in relation to logic and rhetoric, which have often been seen as irreconcilable criteria for the use and interpretations of signs.
(Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted ...)
Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature, therefore, becomes of secondary importance.
(In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his dev...)
In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger each dealt with in one or more of the essays.
(The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most ...)
The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel).
(The subject of the book: between the posts and the analyt...)
The subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond.
(In this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first r...)
In this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time.
(The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consi...)
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard.
(Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a ...)
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics, and values.
(In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us throug...)
In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving.
Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin
(This book intertwines theoretical reflection with histori...)
This book intertwines theoretical reflection with historical and cultural particularity to enunciate, then analyze this conundrum in terms of the author’s own relationship to the French language.
Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida
(Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of relativism an...)
Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of relativism and nihilism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The “Roundtable” is marked by the unusual clarity of Derrida’s presentation and by the deep respect for the great works of the philosophical and literary tradition with which he characterizes his philosophical work.
(Limited Inc is a major work in the philosophy of language...)
Limited Inc is a major work in the philosophy of language by the celebrated French thinker Jacques Derrida. The book's two essays, "Limited Inc" and "Signature Event Context," constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea, that linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate because the contexts that fix meaning are never stable. Limited Inc includes an important new afterword by the author.
Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx
(In a timely intervention in one of today’s most vital the...)
In a timely intervention in one of today’s most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx. The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Möcnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad.
(One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derr...)
One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores difficult questions in this important and engaging book. Is it still possible to uphold international hospitality and justice in the face of increasing nationalism and civil strife in so many countries? Drawing on examples of treatment of minority groups in Europe, he skilfully and accessibly probes the thinking that underlies much of the practice, and rhetoric, that informs cosmopolitanism. What have duties and rights to do with hospitality? Should hospitality be grounded on a private or public ethic, or even a religious one? This fascinating book will be illuminating reading for all.
(Gathered here are texts - letters of condolence, memorial...)
Gathered here are texts - letters of condolence, memorial essays, eulogies, funeral orations written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière.
(Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacq...)
Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career.
Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001
(This collection of essays and interviews, some previously...)
This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
(Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, compr...)
Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state.
(Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French inte...)
Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues.
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher, widely known for his "deconstruction theory" - a complex school of thought which unpicks text in order to reveal its hidden meanings. Derrida is considered an outstanding representative of postmodern philosophy.
Background
Ethnicity:
Jacques Derrida was of a Sephardic Jewish ancestry.
Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria, the son of Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar.
Education
Derrida attended schools in France and entered the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1949, but was a surprisingly weak student for someone who would later be hailed as one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. He failed entrance exams to the Ecole Normale Superior twice, but finally, was admitted in 1952.
Jacques later attended the Ecole Normale Superior, receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy Degree in 1953, a Master's degree in Ethnology in 1954, an Aggregation of Philosophy in 1956, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1967.
Years later, after defending his dissertation, Jacques received a Doctorat d'État des Lettres in 1980.
Jacques received honorary doctorates from Cambridge University, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, University of Essex, University of Leuven, and Williams College.
The Algerian War of Independence began in 1954. Instead of enlisting in military service, Jacques Derrida asked to teach French and English to the children of the soldiers. He held this position from 1957 to 1959. In 1960, Jacques Derrida was hired on to teach philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. He was the assistant to Suzanne Bachelard, French philosopher, and daughter of philosopher Gaston Bachelard. This position he held for four years.
After that, he became the permanent profession at his alma mater, École Normale Supérieure from 1964 to 1984. Jacques Derrida started to connect with a group of philosophers and literary theorists in 1965. The group was called Tel Quel, and they published their essays and other works. Derrida was a regular author and contributor for seven years. The 1966 lecture on “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at John Hopkins University gave Derrida international recognition. The next year, Derrida published three books including Of Grammatology. He continued to publish books and essays as well as give lectures.
In 1983, with François Châtelet and others, he served as co-founder of the International College of Philosophy. He and François Châtelet established the institution as a place for philosophical research that could not be conducted at educational institutions. Derrida was appointed the first president of the institution. In 1986, Jacques Derrida was appointed by the University of California, Irvine as the Professor of the Humanities. He remained on the faculty until 2004 just before his death.
Derrida also participated in making documentaries. In 1983 he collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. He also took part in Derrida's Elsewhere in 1999 and Derrida in 2002.
During his lifetime, Derrida published over forty books. He published three momentous texts "Writing and Difference," "Speech and Phenomena" in 1967, and "Of Grammatology" in 1976. All of these works have been influential for different reasons, but it is "Of Grammatology" that remains his most famous work. In that book, Derrida reveals and then undermines the speech-writing opposition that he argues has been such an influential factor in Western thought. His preoccupation with language in this text is typical of much of his early work, and since the publication of these and other major texts (including Dissemination, Glas, The Postcard, Spectres of Marx, The Gift of Death, and Politics of Friendship), deconstruction has gradually moved from occupying a major role in continental Europe, to also becoming a significant player in the Anglo-American philosophical context.
Among Derrida's other works are "The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond" that was published in 1987, "Acts of Literature" in 1992, "Deconstruction and Pragmatism" in 1996, and "The Instant of My Death" in 2000.
Jacques Derrida held left-wing beliefs in politics and believed that an intellectual should actively participate in society and be a political figure. He contributed to the spread of multiculturalism in France.
Jacques was a member of the campaign staff of Lionel Jospin, a socialist candidate in the presidential election in 1955.
Derrida spoke in support of Eastern European dissidents and was in 1981 in Prague and released after the personal intervention of President Mitterrand in 1982.
In 2002, Derrida, along with other French intellectuals, signed a protest letter to Vladimir Putin about human rights violations in Chechnya.
Views
Jacques Derrida developed a strategy called "deconstruction" in the mid-1960s. Derrida's concept of deconstructionism is difficult to understand, and many critics still feel that the philosopher never adequately explained his beliefs. The essential idea behind it, however, is that the limitation of language and the biases of writers or other artists make their writings or other creations to which deconstructionism was later applied, such as art, film, and architecture unreliable representations of reality. By breaking down, for example, a novel or a book of philosophy, into smaller parts, one can examine and discover its inherent contradictions. Deconstruction gained many adherents, especially in the United States, and from the late 1960s through the 1980s it was a popular form of literary criticism and intellectual dialogue.
Derrida was preoccupied with what has come to be termed "possible-impossible aporias" - aporia was originally a Greek term meaning puzzle, but it has come to mean something more like an impasse or paradox. In particular, Derrida has described the paradoxes that afflict notions like giving, hospitality, forgiving, and mourning. He argues that the condition of their possibility is also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility.
Derrida had a long and complicated association with phenomenology for his entire career, including ambiguous relationships with Husserl and Heidegger, and something closer to a sustained allegiance with Lévinas. Despite this complexity, two main aspects of Derrida's thinking regarding phenomenology remain clear. Firstly, he thinks that the phenomenological emphasis upon the immediacy of experience is the new transcendental illusion, and secondly, he argues that despite its best intents, phenomenology cannot be anything other than a metaphysics. In this context, Derrida defines metaphysics as the science of presence, as for him (as for Heidegger), all metaphysics privileges presence, or that which is.
According to Derrida, phenomenology is a metaphysics of presence because it unwittingly relies upon the notion of an indivisible self-presence, or in the case of Husserl, the possibility of an exact internal adequation with oneself. In various texts, Derrida contests this valorization of an undivided subjectivity, as well as the primacy that such a position accords to the 'now', or to some other kind of temporal immediacy. For instance, in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida argues that if a 'now' moment is conceived of as exhausting itself in that experience, it could not actually be experienced, for there would be nothing to juxtapose itself against in order to illuminate that very 'now'. Instead, Derrida wants to reveal that every so-called ‘present’, or ‘now’ point, is always already compromised by a trace, or a residue of a previous experience, that precludes us ever being in a self-contained 'now' moment. Phenomenology is hence envisaged as nostalgically seeking the impossible: that is, coinciding with oneself in an immediate and pre-reflective spontaneity. Derrida's work offers many important temporal contributions of this quasi-transcendental variety.
Perhaps the most obvious aspect of Derrida's later philosophy is his advocation of the tout autre, the wholly other. For Derrida, the paradox of responsible behavior means that there is always a question of being responsible before a singular other (eg. a loved one, God, etc.), and yet we are also always referred to our responsibility towards others generally and to what we share with them. Derrida insists that this type of aporia, or problem, is too often ignored by the "knights of responsibility" who presume that accountability and responsibility in all aspects of life - whether that be guilt before the human law, or even before the divine will of God - is quite easily established. These are the same people who insist that concrete ethical guidelines should be provided by any philosopher worth his or her 'salt' and who ignore the difficulties involved in a notion like responsibility, which demands something importantly different from merely behaving dutifully.
Quotations:
"To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend."
"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."
"Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets."
"I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe."
"I speak only one language, and it is not my own."
"No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language."
"Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts."
"The poet…is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs…the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds."
"I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect."
"If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction."
"Contrary to what phenomenology - which is always phenomenology of perception - has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes."
"Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom."
"We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself."
"Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace”.
"Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts."
"The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language."
"Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited."
"I rightly pass for an atheist."
"I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately."
"What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context."
Membership
Jacques Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Politicians
Lionel Jospin
Connections
Jacques Derrida was married to Marguerite Aucouturier in 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts while at Harvard. The couple had two children. In 1985, philosopher Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's son, Daniel.