Philosophy

Jacques Derrida

1930–2004 · French (born in Algeria)

Poststructuralism; deconstruction

Jacques Derrida was the founder of deconstruction, the reading practice that hunts out the hierarchies and blind spots buried in a text's own language. In 1967 he published three books at once and became the most argued-over philosopher of his generation, coining a vocabulary — différance, trace, logocentrism, hauntology — that spread far beyond philosophy into literary criticism, law, architecture and cultural studies. Adored in literature departments and distrusted by analytic philosophers, he was the subject of a famous protest when Cambridge proposed an honorary degree in 1992.

How to spot them

▸Deconstruction; logocentrism; the 'metaphysics of presence'; speech privileged over writing
▸Différance — spelled with an 'a' that cannot be heard, only read
▸The slogan 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte', usually rendered 'there is no outside-text'
▸Born in El Biar, Algeria; the 1992 Cambridge honorary degree row; the 2002 documentary that followed him around
▸Hauntology and the spectre, from his 1993 book on the afterlife of communism

Key works

A 1967 book arguing that Western thought has always demoted writing beneath the living voice, and that there is nothing outside the text (1967)

Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie) — his best-known book, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 1976.

The 1967 essay collection containing 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', first delivered at Johns Hopkins the year before (1967)

Writing and Difference (L'écriture et la différence) — the lecture that introduced deconstruction to America.

A 1968 address to the French philosophical society on a deliberately misspelled noun, its altered letter audible to no one, naming both a difference and a deferral (1968)

'Différance' — the lecture given to the Société française de philosophie in January 1968.

A 1972 essay on the Greek word for a drug that is at once remedy and poison, read out of the Phaedrus (1972)

'Plato's Pharmacy' (La pharmacie de Platon), collected in Dissemination — on the pharmakon.

A 1974 book printed in two parallel columns, one on a thief and playwright, the other on the German philosopher of absolute spirit (1974)

Glas — Jean Genet in one column, Hegel in the other, the pun being on the tolling of a funeral bell.

A 1993 book that coined 'hauntology' and insisted that a nineteenth-century spectre still walks through a Europe declaring the end of history (1993)

Specters of Marx — first given as lectures at a conference at UC Riverside, and the source of a term later borrowed by music critics.

Key ideas

Deconstruction: not destruction but a close reading that shows how a text undermines the very oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture) it depends on
Différance: a coined noun, spelled with an 'a' that is silent in French, combining 'to differ' and 'to defer' — meaning is never fully present, only endlessly postponed across a chain of signs
Logocentrism and phonocentrism: the Western habit of treating speech as authentic presence and writing as a fallen copy of it
The supplement: an addition that is claimed to be inessential yet turns out to be required, as writing is to speech
Hauntology: a pun on ontology in which what is neither living nor dead — the ghost, the promise, the revenant — conditions the present
The undecidable and the aporia: terms such as pharmakon or hymen that refuse to settle into one meaning, and so resist the system they sit in

Quick-fire facts

•Born in El Biar, near Algiers, to a Sephardic Jewish family; he was expelled from his lycée in 1942 under the Vichy regime's quotas on Jewish pupils
•In 1967 he published three books in a single year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena
•His 1966 Johns Hopkins lecture 'Structure, Sign, and Play' is usually taken as the moment poststructuralism arrived in the United States
•In 1992 Cambridge dons forced an unprecedented ballot on his honorary doctorate; it was approved by 336 votes to 204
•He helped found the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1983 and was its first director
•He carried on a long and bad-tempered dispute with the American philosopher John Searle over speech-act theory, collected in Limited Inc (1988)
•He was arrested in Prague in 1981 on a trumped-up drug charge after running a clandestine philosophy seminar, and released after French diplomatic pressure
•'The Animal That Therefore I Am' begins with him standing naked under the gaze of his cat
•He died of pancreatic cancer in Paris in October 2004; his funeral address, which he wrote himself, was read at the graveside by his son

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida — Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International