Blackwell Reference Online

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Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El-Bair, Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family. Under the Vichy Government, which had suspended Derrida's French citizenship for two years, he was also expelled from school. He returned in 1944 and began to read philosophy texts. Derrida came to Paris in 1949 with the intention to enter the Ecole Normale Supérieur to study philosophy. After two failures, he was finally admitted in 1952 and was awarded an agregation in 1955. He was awarded the Prix Jean-Cavailles for his introduction to Husserl's Origins of Geometry . Derrida came to fame in 1967 following the publication of three books: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology , and Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs . He is considered the founder of deconstruction. His works and thought have had a profound impact on thinkers such as Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Gayatri Spivak, and Peter Sloterdijk. Deconstruction is Derrida's major contribution to philosophy. Derrida revised the particular employment and phases of deconstruction several times in his oeuvre . In its broadest sense, deconstruction aims to critique Platonist logic, which is based on oppositional pairs that are not equal, but arranged in a hierarchy of importance, or a hierarchy of meaning. In his early career, Derrida argued against an interior language of thought. ... log in or subscribe to read full text