Jacques Derrida
French philosopher
born July 15, 1930, El Biar, Algeria
died October 8, 2004, Paris, France
Main
French philosopher whose critique of Western philosophy and
analyses of the nature of language, writing, and meaning
were highly controversial yet immensely influential in much
of the intellectual world in the late 20th century.
Life and work
Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in
French-governed Algeria. Educated in the French tradition,
he went to France in 1949, studied at the elite École
Normale Supérieure (ENS), and taught philosophy at the
Sorbonne (1960–64), the ENS (1964–84), and the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1984–99), all in Paris.
From the 1960s he published numerous books and essays on an
immense range of topics and taught and lectured throughout
the world, including at Yale University and the University
of California, Irvine, attaining an international celebrity
comparable only to that of Jean-Paul Sartre a generation
earlier.
Derrida is most celebrated as the principal exponent of
deconstruction, a term he coined for the critical
examination of the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or
“oppositions,” inherent in Western philosophy since the time
of the ancient Greeks. These oppositions are
characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a
pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to
be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or
derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and
writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and
outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and
sensible, and form and meaning, among many others. To
“deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and
contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed or
asserted in the text and other aspects of the text’s
meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit.
Such an analysis shows that the opposition is not natural or
necessary but a product, or “construction,” of the text
itself.
The speech/writing opposition, for example, is manifested
in texts that treat speech as a more authentic form of
language than writing. These texts assume that the speaker’s
ideas and intentions are directly expressed and immediately
“present” in speech, whereas in writing they are
comparatively remote or “absent” and thus more easily
misunderstood. As Derrida points out, however, speech
functions as language only to the extent that it shares
characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as
absence, “difference,” and the possibility of
misunderstanding. This fact is indicated by philosophical
texts themselves, which invariably describe speech in terms
of examples and metaphors drawn from writing, even in cases
where writing is explicitly claimed to be secondary to
speech. Significantly, Derrida does not wish simply to
invert the speech/writing opposition—i.e., to show that
writing is really prior to speech. As with any
deconstructive analysis, the point is to restructure, or
“displace,” the opposition so as to show that neither term
is primary.
The speech/writing opposition derives from a pervasive
picture of meaning that equates linguistic meaning with the
ideas and intentions in the mind of the speaker or author.
Building on theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a
difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way
in which linguistic meaning is created rather than given.
For Derrida as for Saussure, the meaning of a word is a
function of the distinctive contrasts it displays with
other, related meanings. Because each word depends for its
meaning on the meanings of other words, it follows that the
meaning of a word is never fully “present” to us, as it
would be if meanings were the same as ideas or intentions;
instead it is endlessly “deferred” in an infinitely long
chain of meanings. Derrida expresses this idea by saying
that meaning is created by the “play” of differences between
words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,” and
“indefinite.”
In the 1960s Derrida’s work was welcomed in France and
elsewhere by thinkers interested in the broad
interdisciplinary movement known as structuralism. The
structuralists analyzed various cultural phenomena—such as
myths, religious rituals, literary narratives, and fashions
in dress and adornment—as general systems of signs analogous
to natural languages, with their own vocabularies and their
own underlying rules and structures, and attempted to
develop a metalanguage of terms and concepts in which the
various sign systems could be described. Some of Derrida’s
early work was a critique of major structuralist thinkers
such as Saussure, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,
and the intellectual historian and philosopher Michel
Foucault. Derrida was thus seen, especially in the United
States, as leading a movement beyond structuralism to
“poststructuralism,” which was skeptical about the
possibility of a general science of meaning.
In other work, particularly three books published in
1967— L’Écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference),
De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), and La Voix et le
phénomène (Speech and Phenomena)—Derrida explored the
treatment of writing by several seminal figures in the
history of Western thought, including the philosophers
Edmund Husserl and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Other books, published in 1972,
include analyses of writing and representation in the work
of philosophers such as Plato (La Dissémination
[Dissemination]) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Husserl,
and Martin Heidegger (Marges de la philosophie [Margins of
Philosophy]). Glas (1974) is an experimental book printed in
two columns—one containing an analysis of key concepts in
the philosophy of Hegel, the other a suggestive discussion
of the thief, novelist, and playwright Jean Genet. Although
Derrida’s writing had always been marked by a keen interest
in what words can do, here he produced a work that plays
with juxtaposition to explore how language can incite
thought.
One might distinguish in Derrida’s work a period of
philosophical deconstruction from a later period focusing on
literature and emphasizing the singularity of the literary
work and the play of meaning in avant-garde writers such as
Genet, Stéphane Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and James Joyce.
His later work also took up a host of other issues, notably
the legacy of Marxism (Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette,
le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale [1993;
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International]) and psychoanalysis (La
Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà [1980; The Post
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]). Other essays
considered political, legal, and ethical issues, as well as
topics in aesthetics and literature. He also addressed the
question of Jewishness and the Jewish tradition in
Shibboleth and the autobiographical Circumfession (1991).
Criticism
Although critical examination of fundamental concepts is a
standard part of philosophical practice in the Western
tradition, it has seldom been carried out as rigorously as
in the work of Derrida. His writing is known for its extreme
subtlety, its meticulous attention to detail, and its
tenacious pursuit of the logical implications of supposedly
“marginal” features of texts. Nevertheless, his work has met
with considerable opposition among some philosophers,
especially those in the Anglo-American tradition. In 1992
the proposal by the University of Cambridge to award Derrida
an honorary doctorate generated so much controversy that the
university took the unusual step of putting the issue to a
vote of the dons (Derrida won); meanwhile, 19 philosophers
from around the globe published a letter of protest in which
they claimed that Derrida’s writing was incomprehensible and
his major claims either trivial or false. In the same vein,
other critics have portrayed Derrida as an antirational and
nihilistic opponent of “serious” philosophical thinking.
Despite such criticism, Derrida’s ideas remain a powerful
force in philosophy and myriad other fields.
Major Works
Most accessible to a general reader are the early interviews
in Positions (1972; Positions, trans. by Alan Bass, 1981),
and a later selection, including a letter and discussion
concerning the Cambridge honorary degree, in Points de
suspension, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (1992; Points …:
Interviews, 1974–1994,1995). “Circonfession,” in Geoffrey
Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991;
Jacques Derrida, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, 1993),
combines theoretical discussion by Bennington with playfully
disruptive autobiographical remarks by Derrida.
Representative selections with introductory commentary can
be found in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by
Peggy Kamuf (1991). Derrida’s classic critique of the
treatment of speech and writing in Western philosophy
appears in the more difficult essays of L’Écriture et la
différence (1967; Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan
Bass, 1978), and Marges de la philosophie (1972; Margins of
Philosophy, 1982), as well as in the celebrated De la
grammatologie (1967; Of Grammatology, 1976), which focuses
on the work of Saussure and Rousseau. La Dissémination
(1972; Dissemination, 1981) contains a crucial essay on
Plato. Limited Inc (1988) is a polemical exchange with the
American philosopher John Searle about the theory of speech
acts; the volume includes an afterword, “Toward an Ethic of
Discussion,” that clearly articulates Derrida’s positions on
many contemporary theoretical issues.
Discussions of literature can be found in Acts of
Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (1992), which includes an
important interview as well as key essays on Joyce, Franz
Kafka, Ponge, Paul Celan, and William Shakespeare. Donner le
temps (1991; Given Time, 1992) is an exemplary analysis of a
prose poem by Charles Baudelaire. Psychoanalysis is covered
in essays on Freud and Jacques Lacan in La Carte postale: de
Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980; The Post Card: From
Socrates to Freud and Beyond, 1987). Spectres de Marx:
l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle
Internationale (1993; Specters of Marx: The State of the
Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 1994)
treats the legacy of Marxism. La Vérité en peinture (1978;
The Truth in Painting, 1987) is an advanced discussion of
aesthetic theory and avant-garde artistic practice. L’Autre
cap: suivi de la democratie ajournée (1991; The Other
Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, 1992) is a more
straightforward reflection on issues confronting the new
Europe. Politiques de l’amitié (1994; Politics of
Friendship, 1997) explores philosophical reflections on
friendship and the importance of friendship for a politics
of the future.
