Life
Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), Algeria, to Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (known as "Aimé") Derrida (1896–1970), who worked all his life for the wine and spirits company Tachet, including as a travelling salesman (his son reflected the job was "exhausting" and "humiliating", his father forced to be a "docile employee" to the extent of waking early to do the accounts at the dining-room table), and Georgette Sultana Esther (1901–1991),Bennington (1991), p. 325. daughter of Moïse Safar. His family was Sephardic Jewish, (originally from Toledo, Spain, Toledo) and became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. His parents named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although 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 Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid (1921 film), ''The Kid''.Powell (2006), p. 12. He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name". See also 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 his role as a replacement for his deceased brother.'''' Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar. On the first day of the school year in 1942, French Algeria, French administrators in Algeria —implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy France, Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. 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 association football, football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche, and André Gide, Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society. His reading also included Albert Camus, Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre. In the late 1940s, he attended the , in Algiers; in 1949 he moved to Paris, attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne. At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952. On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. A professor of his, Jan Czarnecki, was a progressive Protestant who would become a signer of the Manifesto of the 121. After visiting the Husserl-Archives Leuven, Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy (') on Edmund Husserl (see #Early works, below). He then passed the highly competitive ''agrégation'' exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's ''Ulysses (novel), Ulysses'' at the Widener Library.Caputo (1997), p. 25. In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959. Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston Bachelard, Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term ''hermeneutics of suspicion''), and Jean Wahl. His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre Alféri, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984. In 1965 Derrida began an association with the ''Tel Quel'' group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.Powell (2006), p. 58. Derrida's subsequent distance from the ''Tel Quel'' group, after 1971, was connected to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. 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 gain 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. 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''. In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate (''doctorat d'État'') by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title "" ("Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing").Powell (2006), p. 145. The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" (""); his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations". In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen (film director), Ken McMullen on the film ''Ghost Dance (film), Ghost Dance''. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script. Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor () at the in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983). With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the (CIPH; 'International college of philosophy'), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel."Obituary: Jacques Derrida"Philosophy
Derrida referred to himself as a historian.Derrida (1989) ''This Strange Institution Called Literature'', p. 54: He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture. By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it.Derrida (1992) ''Cambridge Review'', pp. 404, 408–13. Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "Early works
Derrida began his career examining the limits of Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. Gary Banham has said that the dissertation is "in many respects the most ambitious of Derrida's interpretations with Husserl, not merely in terms of the number of works addressed but also in terms of the extraordinarily focused nature of its investigation." 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 (book), Positions'' (1972), Derrida said: 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.Bensmaïa, Réda, "Poststructuralism", in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93.Poster (1988), pp. 5–6. 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 had a mixed relationship.Phenomenology vs structuralism debate (1959)
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 (philosophy), 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." 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 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? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. 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 original 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.Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp. 77–8: On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) ''Jacques Derrida and the Humanities'' (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, ''Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 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". 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.1967–1972
Derrida's interests crossed 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'' (initially submitted as a thesis under Maurice de Gandillac),Alan D. Schrift (2006), ''Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers'', Blackwell Publishing, p. 120. and ''Writing and Difference''.Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp. 4–5: "[''Speech and Phenomena''] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless, I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works. ''Of Grammatology'' refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture, ''Speech...'' would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology." On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Edmund Husserl, Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8.On the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (''Derrida and différance'', eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (philosopher), David Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms ''Destruktion'' and ''Abbau'', via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in ''Writing and Difference'' entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerge: the Other as opposed to the Same "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something ''tout autre'', "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."Caputo (1997), p. 42. Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Saussure, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel,"From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve" in ''Writing and Difference''. Michel Foucault, Foucault,"Cogito and the History of Madness" in ''Writing and Difference''. Georges Bataille, Bataille, René Descartes, Descartes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Freud, and writers such as Edmond Jabès, Jabès and Antonin Artaud, Artaud. 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, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenistic philosophy, Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculine, masculinist. Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture",Wayne A. Borody1973–1980
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as ''Glas (book), Glas'' (1974) and ''The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond'' (1980). 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 1980s culture wars, American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.Sven Ove Hansson – ''Editorial From Theoria'' vol. 72, Part 1 (2006).''Of Spirit'' (1987)
On 14 March 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference entitled "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. 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?" 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''). 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." ''Of Spirit'' contributes to the long Heidegger and Nazism, 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 Nazism, 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.1990s: political and ethical themes
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a political and ethical "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). Some refer to ''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 Binding of Isaac, Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard's ''Fear and Trembling''. However, scholars such as Leonard Lawlor, Robert Magliola, and Nicole Anderson have argued that the "turn" has been exaggerated. Some, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays. Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this. 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 (legal philosopher), Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt (professor), Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction. Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as ''Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas'', an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively. Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others. In 1991 he published ''The Other Heading'', in which he discussed the concept of Identity (social science), 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." At the 1997 Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.''The Work of Mourning'' (1981–2001)
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, "Unique each time, the end of the world"), to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.2002 film
In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film ''Derrida (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."Derrida (2002), Q&A session at Film Forum. Among the places in which Derrida mentions the ''Spectacle (critical theory), Spectacle'', is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.Debate with Jean Baudrillard
On 19 February 2003, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq impending, moderated a debate entitled ''"Pourquoi La Guerre Aujourd’hui?"'' between Jean Baudrillard#Debate with Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Derrida, co-hosted by ''Major's Institute for Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis'' and ''Le Monde Diplomatique''. The debate discussed the relation between terrorist attacks and the invasion.MLA Brennan, Eugene. Review of Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui?, by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida. French Studies: A Quarterly Review, vol. 71 no. 3, 2017, p. 449-449. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/666299. APA Brennan, E. (2017). [Review of the book Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui?, by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida]. French Studies: A Quarterly Review 71(3), 449. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/666299. Chicago Brennan, Eugene. Review of Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui?, by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida. French Studies: A Quarterly Review 71, no. 3 (2017): 449-449. muse.jhu.edu/article/666299. Endnote TY - JOUR T1 - Pourquoi la guerre aujourd’hui? by Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida (review) A1 - Brennan, Eugene JF - French Studies: A Quarterly Review VL - 71 IS - 3 SP - 449 EP - 449 PY - 2017 PB - Oxford University Press SN - 1468-2931 UR - https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/8/article/666299 N1 - Volume 71, Number 3, July 2017 ER -Politics
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates: * Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the ''École Normale Superieure'', he said "I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally "freed" speech, of restored "transparence," and so forth."Derrida (1991) ''"A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking"'', pp. 347–9. During May '68, he met frequently with Maurice Blanchot. * He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States. * In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the French petition against age of consent laws, petition against age of consent laws. * In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean-Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.Powell (2006), p. 151. * In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leading a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled", as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the François Mitterrand, Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on 1 January 1982. * He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1984. * He was active in cultural activities against the History of South Africa in the apartheid era, Apartheid government of South Africa and on behalf of Nelson Mandela beginning in 1983. * He met with Palestinian people, Palestinian intellectuals during a 1988 visit to Jerusalem. * He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-utilitarianism, utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. * Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin's French Socialist Party, Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to French Communist Party, Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS. * In the 2002 French presidential election he refused to vote in the run-off between far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen and center-right Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices. * While supportive of the American government in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (see ''Rogues'' and his contribution to ''Philosophy in a Time of Terror'' with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas). 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.Influences on Derrida
Crucial readings in his adolescence were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau's ''Reveries of a Solitary Walker'' and ''Confessions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Confessions'', André Gide's journal, ''La porte étroite'', ''Les nourritures terrestres'' and ''The Immoralist''; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.Derrida (1989) ''This Strange Institution Called Literature'', pp. 35, 38–9. 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. 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 he'll find rest" (''Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos''). Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas,Peers and contemporaries
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, students and the heirs of Derrida's thought include 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, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Ernesto Laclau, Samuel Weber, Catherine Malabou, and Claudette Sartiliot.Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
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 a method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s. Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: ''Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy'' (''On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy'', 2005).Paul de Man
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. Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the 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 History of Belgium#World War II, German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic. 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 Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.Michel Foucault
Derrida's criticism of Michel Foucault, Foucault appears in the essay ''Cogito and the History of Madness'' (from ''Writing and Difference''). It was first given as a lecture on 4 March 1963, at a conference at Jean Wahl, Wahl's ''Collège philosophique'', which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.Powell (2006), pp. 34–5. 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." 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.Carlo Ginzburg [1976], ''Il formaggio e i vermi'', translated in 1980 asDerrida's translators
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. 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. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's ''Dissemination'' was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. 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. Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills (writer), David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. Volumes I and II of ''The Beast and the Sovereign'' (presenting Derrida's seminars from 12 December 2001 to 27 March 2002 and from 11 December 2002 to 26 March 2003), as well as ''The Death Penalty, Volume I'' (covering 8 December 1999 to 22 March 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). 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."Marshall McLuhan
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," of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West." He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.Poster (2010), pp. 3–4, 12–13. In a 1982 interview, he said: And in his 1972 essay ''Signature Event Context'' he said:Architectural thinkers
Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman in ''Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman''. This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of the ''khôra''. Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion of ''khôra'' (χώρα) as set in the ''Timaeus (dialogue), Timaeus'' (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri within the domain of phenomenology (architecture), phenomenology. Derrida used "χώρα" to name a radical otherness that "gives place" for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking ''khôra'' to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings. El-Bizri's reflections on "''khôra''" are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on ''dwelling'' and on ''being and space'' in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking), and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics. This also describes El-Bizri's take on "econtology" as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (''Seinsfrage'') by way of the fourfold (''Das Geviert'') of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (''Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen''); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on "χώρα". Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's ''khôra'', Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that ''khôra'' rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida, ''khôra'' defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he "deconstructed".Criticism
Criticism from Marxists
In a paper entitled ''Ghostwriting'', Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's ''De la grammatologie'' (''Of Grammatology'') into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx. 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."Criticism from Anglophone philosophers
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in 1988, and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine,J. E. D'Ulisse,Searle–Derrida debate
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points.Derrida, Jacques. ''Limited, Inc.'' Northwestern University Press, 1988. p. 29: "...I have read some of his [Searle's] work (more, in any case, than he seems to have read of mine)". Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida'sCambridge honorary doctorate
In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy David Hugh Mellor, Hugh Mellor. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and British institutions, including Barry Smith (academic and ontologist), Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Malet Armstrong, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists". The letter concluded that: In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a formal ballot;John Rawlings (librarian), John Rawlings (1999Dispute with Richard Wolin and the ''NYRB''
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".Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin (ed.) ''The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p. xiii. . 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 the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan (academic), 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.NYBooks.com: 2658Critical obituaries
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in ''The New York Times'', ''The Economist'', and ''The Independent''.Works by Derrida
See also
* Gadamer–Derrida debate * Difference (poststructuralism)Notes
Works cited
*Geoffrey Bennington (1991).Further reading
Biographies
*Peeters, Benoît (2012) ''Derrida: A Biography''. Cambridge: Polity *Salmon, Peter (2020) ''An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida''. London: Verso.Introductory works
*Adleman, Dan (2010) "Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory"Other works
*Giorgio Agamben, Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, ''Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy'', ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205–19. *Beardsworth, Richard, ''Derrida and the Political'' (). *Geoffrey Bennington, Bennington, Geoffrey, ''Legislations'' (). *Bennington, Geoffrey, ''Interrupting Derrida'' (). * Simon Critchley, Critchley, Simon, *John D. Caputo, Caputo, John D., ''The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida''. *Harold Coward, Coward, Harold G. (ed) ''Derrida and Negative theology'', SUNY 1992. *Federico Dal Bo, Dal Bo, F. ''Deconstructing the Talmud'' Routledge 2019. *Paul de Man, de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, ''Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism'', second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102–41. *Nader El-Bizri, El-Bizri, Nader, "Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus", ''Existentia Meletai-Sophias'' 11 (2001), pp. 473–490. *Nader El-Bizri, El-Bizri, Nader, "''ON KAI KHORA'': Situating Heidegger between the ''Sophist'' and the ''Timaeus (dialogue), Timaeus''," ''Studia Phaenomenologica'' 4 (2004), pp. 73–98. * Fabbri, LorenzoExternal links
* Leonard Lawlor.