Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher, recognized as one of the most influential in the structuralist and post-structuralist tradition that has been part of contemporary Western philosophy. He is, among other things, the founder of “deconstruction”, a way of critically analyzing the literary organization of texts and philosophy, as well as the political organization of institutions.

In this article we will see developed the biography of Jacques Derrida , one of the most influential philosophers for the theory and literary and political criticism of the 20th and 21st century.

Jacques Derrida: biography of an influential contemporary philosopher

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El Biar, Algeria , which at that time was a French colony. He was the son of Judeo-Spanish parents and was educated in the French tradition from an early age.

In 1949, after the Second World War, he tried to enter the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. However, it was not until 1952 that he managed to enter, after repeating the entrance exam for the second time. He was formed in an intellectual climate where several of the most representative philosophers of the twentieth century were at their peak . For example, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Althusser, Lacan, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss or Levinas.

Derrida worked closely with some of them, and also remained critical of several of their proposals. For example, he made important readings on the works of Levinas and Michel Foucault, who was criticized for his interpretation of Descartes.

Likewise, he developed his work in what was the century of the development and rise of phenomenology . Derrida was formed very close to his maximum exponent, Edmund Husserl. Later he specialised in Hegel’s philosophy together with Jean Hyppolite and Maurice de Gandillac, from whom he wrote a doctoral thesis in 1953 on “The Ideal of the Literary Object”.

Academic activity

In the following years, his work became very extensive and complex, while he taught philosophy at the Sorbonne University from 1960 to 1964, at which time he began to write and publish numerous articles and books dealing with quite diverse themes.

Later he also taught at his alma mater, the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, all in Paris. He was also a visiting professor at various universities around the world, including Yale University and the University of California.

Deconstruction and meaning

Jacques Derrida is recognised, among other things, for having developed “deconstruction”, which refers to a rather complex act whose interpretation and applications can be very different, and which has nevertheless marked the philosophical production of a good part of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In very broad terms, Derrida uses deconstruction to critically examine the conceptual paradigms on which Western society has been based from the beginnings of Greek philosophy to the present day.

Such paradigms are strongly charged with a particular element: dichotomies (hierarchical oppositions between two concepts), which have generated binary thoughts and understandings about world phenomena and about human beings. They have also generated forms of identification and construction of certain subjectivities.

As they are hierarchical oppositions, they have the consequence that we understand one of the two phenomena of the dichotomy as the primary, or fundamental, phenomenon, and the second as a derivative. For example, what happens in the classic distinction between mind and body; nature and culture; the literal and the metaphorical, among many others.

Through deconstruction, Derrida made visible and operative the way in which philosophy, science, art or politics have emerged as a result of these oppositions , which among other things has had effects in subjective terms, and in experience and social organization.

And he made this visible and operational mainly through examining the contradictions and tensions between these hierarchies (whether they are presented explicitly or implicitly), as well as analysing their consequences in terms of construction of meaning.

Precisely, what derives from the latter is the suggestion that the paradigms on which our societies have settled are not natural, immovable and neither necessary by themselves; but they are a product or a construction.

Literary criticism and text analysis

While Derrida develops this from literary criticism, the deconstruction applies initially to the analysis of the text . An example is the opposition between discourse and writing, where discourse is understood as the primordial and most authentic element. Derrida shows that the same composition traditionally associated with writing is present in discourse, as is the possibility of equivocation.

By revealing the constructions in the composition structure, it is shown the impossibility of creating terms that are primordial , and therefore hierarchical, so there may be a possibility of restructuring.

For Derrida, the meaning of a word is a function that takes place in the contrast shown by relating it to another. It follows that the meaning is never fully revealed to us, nor “truly”, as if the word itself were the naming object in itself. Rather, it is about meanings that we share after a long and infinite chain of contrasting meanings.

Bibliographic references:

  • Encyclopedia Britannica (2018). Jacques Derrida. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 26, 2018. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jacques-Derrida.
  • Lawlor, L. (2018). Jacques Derrida. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved June 26, 2018. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/.