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Jacques Derrida (; French: ; born Jackie Élie Derrida;[1] July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.[2][3][4]
During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence upon the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law,[5][6][7] anthropology,[8] historiography,[9] linguistics,[10] sociolinguistics,[11] psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, and queer studies. His work still has a major influence in the academe of Continental Europe, South America and all other countries where continental philosophy is predominant, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. Jacques Derrida's work also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music,[12] art,[13] and art critics.[14] Derrida was said to "leave behind a legacy of himself as the 'originator' of deconstruction."[15]
Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes present in his work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements.[16] Derrida became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious difficulty of his work made him controversial.[16][17]
Derrida was born at daybreak on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in
Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home. [...] The boy's main forename was probably chosen because of Jackie Coogan ... When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
1930 Birth of Jackie Derrida, July 15, in El-Biar (near Algiers, in a holiday house).
When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written (12-23-76)' the name of the prophet Élie, Elijah in English ... so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou Derrida ...
If it were only a question of "my" work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can't be limited to a personal "oeuvre," nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work. If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene. ... In short, to answer your question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," I would say that these critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate.
Selected translations of works by Derrida
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,[16] The Economist[133] and The Independent.[134] The magazine The Nation responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."[42][44]
Christopher Wise in his book Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by Robert J.C. Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) and extended in his Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria. In contrast, Wise compares Derrida's thought to precolonial notions of the word that are rooted in ancient Egyptian and African society. Wise argues that Derridean concept of spirit/specter as occult pharmakon is indebted not only to the Hebraic notion of ruah but also the Egyptian heka, Soninke naxamala, Mande nyama, and many other comparable Egypto-African concepts of the word, some that are historically prior to the Hebraic ruah. Wise suggests that Derrida deliberately elides related African concepts of the word in order to accord Judaism a place of special prominence within the history of European philosophy. He argues instead that European philosophy must acknowledge its historical indebtedness to Middle Eastern and African thought, which is not limited to the influence of Judaism alone.
Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.[132]
In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.[130] Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points....[131]
Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".[129]
In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a vote;[127] though almost all of those voting in favour were not from the philosophy faculty. Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene." To answer the question about the "exceptional violence," the compulsive "ferocity," and the "exaggeration" of the "attacks," he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case "a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate".[128]
... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.:[126]
Eighteen protesters from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and UK institutions, including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:
Derrida has often been the target of attacks by analytic philosophers; an attack of major significance was their 1992 attempt at stopping Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate.[125]
Searle wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."[124]
According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: (a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte); (b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. ″"il n'y a pas de hors-texte" means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts";[123] (c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—-for example—-that everything exists in some context is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim--nothing exists outside of text [sic]--had been established.
Searle argues that the ideas upon which deconstruction is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. For example, Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token." [122]
The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language—referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics in Anglo-Saxon countries. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure."[122] Something that is common in countries where analytic philosophy is not the dominant tradition. Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that is to say, disconnected from analytic tradition—and consequently, in his perspective, naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be non-issues.[122] Derrida argued that such arguments ad hominem do not address the substance of his critique.
In 1972 Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", an essay on J. L. Austin's speech act theory; following a critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote in the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long defense of his original argument.
Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for allegedly misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1998).
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood".[121]
In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.[120]
Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.[80][85]
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association at least on one occasion in 1988,[117] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas,[118] and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine,[119] as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.
In a paper entitled Ghostwriting[114] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx.[115] Commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx, Terry Eagleton wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody."[116]
"As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and "communication of consciousnesses." We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism."[113]
"I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too."[112]
Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium,"[109] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."[110]
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."[108]
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.[106] Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002 and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I (covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964-1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).[107]
Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.
In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text."[104] According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.[105] Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.[105]
Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.[30]
Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.
Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.
Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Samuel Weber and Catherine Malabou.
His book, Adieu à Emanuel Levinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.
Other influences upon Derrida are Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Austin[40] and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist;[27] and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.[27] The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV.[102] In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).[103]
Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:
In the October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle."[95] Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.[96]
Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."[94]
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.
Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida utilized Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.[93]
Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac,[91][92] and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.
Of Spirit is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.[90]
On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.[86] With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?"[87] His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II).[88] He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this Geflecht [braid]": "the question of the question," "the essence of technology," "the discourse of animality," and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order."[89]
Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,[42] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.[80][85]
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).
In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel .[83][84] This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.
This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric,[80] and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.[81] He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.[81][82] Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture",[81] arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings."[80] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.
On several occasions Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Bataille,[72] Descartes,[73] anthropologist Lévi-Strauss,[74][75] paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan,[76] psychoanalyst Freud,[77] and writers such as Jabès[78] and Artaud.[79]
Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.[66]
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.[65]
In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[61] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[62] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[63] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".[64]
Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.
In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a "phenomenology vs structuralism debate."
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.
Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.[2][3][60]
At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl.[58] In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."[59]
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion,[48] which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967),[51] is the statement that "there is no outside-text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).[51] Critics of Derrida have mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text"). Critics have widely disseminated this mistranslation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.[52][53][54][55][56] Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."[52][57]
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text, in a broad sense,[48][49] Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism and he posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.[50]
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism," Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from our conception of speech's relation to writing to our understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such metaphysics.
On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as a historian.[40][41] Derrida questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture.[42] By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it.[43] During the American 1980s culture wars, this would attract the anger of politically conservative and right-wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.[42][43][44][45] Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction".[42] On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.[46][47]
At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Gadamer professorship,[39] whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Prof. Dr. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."[39]
In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.[38]
Late in his life, Derrida participated in two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida [Derrida's Elsewhere] by Saafa Fathy (1999),[36] and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).[37]
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected; he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology). He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.
He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and University of Silesia and many others around the world.
He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.
In 1986, Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although the suit was dropped in 2007.[35]
Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida was full professor (directeur d'études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.[34]
He completed his D. Litt. (doctorat d'État) in 1980, submitting his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project; the text of Derrida's defense was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
With Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to assume international prominence. At the same colloquium, Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come.[33] A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.
Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term School of suspicion) and Jean Wahl.[29] His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure, which he kept until 1984.[30][31] In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.[31] Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[32]
His readings also included Camus and Sartre.[27] On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his master's degree in Philosophy (diplôme d'études supérieures) on Edmund Husserl. He then achieved the highly competitive agrégation exam. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–7 academic year reading Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.[28] In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.
On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide an instrument of revolt against the family and society:[27]
Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life that he was a replacement for his deceased brother.[23] His youth was spent in Algiers and El-Biar.
[26]; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name."circumcision, named after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his Élie He was also given the middle name [25][24][23]The Kid. film Charlie Chaplin, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Jackie Coogan named him Jackie, "which they considered to be an American name," though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor [22][21][20]
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Epistemology, Logic, Analytic philosophy, Aesthetics, Continental philosophy
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Jacques Derrida, John D. Caputo, Metaphysics, Justice, Deconstruction
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Epistemology, Aesthetics, Structuralism, Philosophy, Postmodernism