Continental · 1930–2004
Jacques Derrida
Algerian-born French philosopher who founded deconstruction
Derrida argued that Western thought privileges presence (speech over writing, the original over the copy), yet every such hierarchy depends on what it excludes; deconstruction reads texts to show this instability.
Life and thought
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in El Biar, near Algiers. At twelve he was expelled from his school under the Vichy regime’s antisemitic quotas, an experience of exclusion he returned to often. He studied and later taught at the École normale supérieure in Paris, and in 1967 published three books at once that launched deconstruction. From the 1970s he taught regularly in the United States, where his influence on literary studies was immense.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy rests on pairs in which one side is privileged as original and present: speech over writing, the literal over the metaphorical, the inside over the outside. Plato and Rousseau treated writing as a mere copy of speech, yet speech already works like writing, through marks whose meaning depends on differences and on contexts that can never be closed. He coined “différance”, both differing and deferring, for this play. Deconstruction is not destruction: it reads a text closely to show how its central hierarchy depends on what it excludes.