Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

Supérieure was. But their teenage son, the brilliantly curious bookworm, already had his sights set on this immensely pres- tigi ...

Derrida first saw France in 1949 , as he arrived at the bustling port of Marseilles, full then as now with lively, and partly il ...

fortresses, constituting “a kind of monastery for boy geniuses” (as James Miller describes the École Normale in his biography of ...

bridge. At cocktail parties, people expressed real curiosity about his research; genuine intellectual exchanges appeared more po ...

(In 1960 , Sartre was one of the key authors of the Manifesto of the 121 , a petition denouncing the French actions in Algeria, ...

appealed to Sartre because he thought of the object world as a cause of philosophical wonder and disorientation. But Husserl was ...

decision, typical of Stalinist intellectuals, was to conceal his knowledge that the Soviet Union was a police state “pour ne pas ...

empty strivers yearning for fullness. In Sartre’s terms, we are each the for-itself that wants to be in-itself. Yet Sartre insis ...

thought and its historical epoch, as Hegel does, Derrida re- mains concerned with the transhistorical assertions of meta- physic ...

and Breton were already presences in French intellectual life; the others would become famous later on. Kojève was fond of refer ...

the sense of a possibly ungrounded rumor or tale. In effect, Derrida turns the logos into a mythos, albeit a powerful, all- perv ...

or postpone. Derrida, in his wide-ranging essay, finds the idea of différance in the works of the linguist Ferdinand de Saus- su ...

difference. What we take to be the substantial presence of a speaker understanding a thought and communicating it as a message t ...

much current theory) that anything contingent is unworthy of our belief. (As I explain in chapter 2 , Derrida’s embracing of Nie ...

Derrida had explored the skeptical response to metaphysical statements about the certainty of meaning. How could ethical imperat ...

from this Husserlian problem and toward a simplified sense that metaphysical claims are always undermined by the con- tingency o ...

fluenced by Husserl, dedicated to him the first edition of his magnum opus Being and Time( 1927 ). (He retracted the dedi- catio ...

Husserl was devoted to the importance of human reason, increasingly so as Europe sank into the morass of totalitarian ideology i ...

on the basis of its original premises. The permanence of a dis- cipline like geometry consists in the way it offers possibility ...

dangerous, important elements are overlooked in his attempt to establish the truth. Consider the aspects of life addressed in An ...