1207In the spirit of his celebrated dictum that “there is nothing outside the text,”
Jacques Derrida long resisted the publication of information about his life. For
seventeen years (1962–1979), he even refused to have a personal photograph
accompany his texts. However, his fame as the founder of what came to be called
“deconstruction” led him to provide biographical “scraps.”
Born in 1930 near Algiers, Jacques Derrida as a Jew was forced to leave school
in 1942 until the Free French repealed Vichy racial laws. At 19, he moved to Paris
to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, where he subsequently studied and
taught philosophy. Though his first published work (1962)—about Husserl’s
essay on geometry—won a philosophical prize, Derrida was not widely known
until 1966. At a conference on France’s new structuralism at Johns Hopkins
University, Derrida gave a paper—“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences”—that daringly exposed contradictions in the thought of
structuralism’s leading figure, Lévi-Strauss. Derrida’s critique became one of the
important building blocks in what came to be called “poststructuralism.”
The following year, Derrida continued his critique, publishing no less than
three books showing how structuralist positions refuted their own theses. The
books—Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference,and Speech and Phenomena
(as the titles were translated)—created a storm of philosophical debate in France.
In these works, Derrida showed how his critique went beyond structuralism and
attacked the enterprise of philosophy itself. “Deconstruction,” as Derrida’s
approach in these works was now called, claimed that the very nature of a written
text—of every traditional text and not just the structuralist’s—undermines itself.
To “deconstruct” a text, then, is to dismantle inherent hierarchical systems of
thought, to seek out unregarded details, to find the “margins” of the text, where
there are new possibilities of interpretation.JAC Q U E S DERRIDA
1930–2004