Jacques Derrida
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Life
Youth
In 1930 Derrida was born in a Jewish family in Algiers, at the time French Algeria, a colony. 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.
Education
At the age of nineteen, he moved to France, where he studied several years in Marseille. In 1952, Derrida was accepted at the "École Normale supérieure" in Paris, where he met people such as Pierre Bourdieu. Already as a student, Derrida was very much interested in connections between philosophy and literature, which also inspired him for the choice of subject for his thesis and which would remain of his interest during the rest of his carreer.
Carreer
In 1957 he married his wife Marguerite Aucouturier. After graduating Derrida stayed at Harvard for one year. In the early sixties he became a teacher, first at the "Sorbonne", later at "École Normale supérieure" where before he had been a student himself. He published his first articles in French magazines in the sixties. His break through as a scientist came in 1967, after publishing three books in one year: L'ecriture et la Difference, La voix et le phénomène and De la grammatologie. Which was just the beginning of a series of many publications of his hand. In 1980 Derrida achieved the 'doctorat d'État' at the Sorbonne. In 1983 he established the Collège International de Philosophie. Derrida stayed more and more in the US, where he was much more appreciated than in his own country and where he got more and more involved in the debate on deconstruction. But also his Jewish roots became more and more important in his life and carreer, which results for example in his studies and publications on Franz Kafka and Paul Celan, but also in his criticism on politics of Israël (etc.). This interest and involvement in politics showed increasingly in the late eighties.
Derrida died in 2004.
Theories
Deconstruction Theory
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). Meaning is created trough the binary structure. One of Derrida's explanations on deconstruction is the famous sentence 'there's nothing outside the text'. Hereby he means that when you interpret a text by several references are also texts. There is no truly objective from where you can begin to interpret or understand a text.
Work
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.
Example
The thinking and approach of Jacques Derrida was relevant for geography. As already mentioned deconstruction is based on showing paradoxes, contradictions and contingent nature. It is a way to make certain catgories. Every term is always linked to another term, but there is always a difference between those two. An example is the paradox between the terms production and consumption. Shops and factories are different but they are related. Factories need shops to consume the products, and shops need factories to produce the products. There will always needs that are consumed in shops, and that means that these products has to be produced. This could lead to regional development. An example is Ikea, this company provides regional econmical effects. The thinking of Jacques Deridda had influence on the geographical way of thinking, for example regional development.
References
- Approaches to Human Geography, (2006), Sixth Edition, SAGE.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 12 January 2010.
- Caputo, J.D. (1997). Deconstruction in a nutshel: A conversation with Jacaques Derrida. Fordham University Press.
- De Schutter, D. (2008). Jacques Derrida. In Doorman, M. & Pott, H. (Eds.) Filosofen van deze tijd (pp.289-302). Amsterdam, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker.
Contributors
- Page published by Thijs Koolhof and Tobias Geerdink
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- Links added by --AafkeBrus 10:51, 12 September 2011 (UTC)
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- Page added to the category Post-structuralism by Anke Janssen
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