Jacques Derrida

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Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French philosopher born in El-Bair, Algiers. He developed the critical technique known as deconstruction, which is a reaction on structuralism, in which he tries to deconstruct the established truths by means of language

Life

Derrida was born in Algiers, then French Algeria, into a Jewish family. He spent his youth in El-Bair where he dreamed of becoming a professional football player but also read works of philosophers and philosophers such as Rousseau, Camus, Nietzsche and Gide. He began to think seriously about philosophy around the time he moved to France where he stayed the rest of his live.

Work

Derrida is known as the founding father of the deconstruction theory. Which is a method of analysis that seeks to critique and destabilize stable systems of meaning in discourses by showing their paradoxes, contradictions and contingent nature (Approaches to Human Geography, p. 338)

It was in 1967 (almost twenty years after his move to France) that Derrida really arrived as a philosopher of importance. He published three texts Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie 1967), Writing and Difference (L'écriture et la différance 1967), and Speech and Phenomena (La voix et le phénomène 1967).

His most famous work is Of Grammatology. In this writing Derrida reveals and then undermines the speech-writing opposition that he argues has been seen as an influential factor in Western thought. His preoccupation with language in this text is typical of much of his early work, and since the publication of these and other major texts deconstruction has moved from occupying a role in continental Europe, to becoming a significant player in the Anglo-American philosophical context. This is particularly so in the areas of literary criticism, and cultural studies, where deconstruction’s method of textual analysis has inspired theorists like Paul de Man.

Sources

Approaches to Human Geography, Sixth Edition, SAGE, 2006.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 12 January 2010.

This page was made by Thijs Koolhof (4048385) and Tobias Geerdink (4076923).