I
From Algeria to the
École Normale:
Sartre, Hegel, Husserl
errida’s thought cannot be understood apart from
his life. From the beginning, he was an intellectual
outsider, a rebel. His efforts to redefine the disci-
pline of philosophy took place against the rigid in-
stitutional system of the École Normale Supérieure. The young
man from Algeria, a colonial backwater, confronted the pow-
ers that be in Paris, the vibrant center of advanced thought.
Throughout his life, Derrida retained his early sense of being
excluded from the sophisticated hierarchy that told students
what and how to think. Even when deconstruction became a
dominant institutional force in America, Derrida still felt that
he was a marginal figure, persecuted by the press and its opin-
ion makers. A close look at Derrida’s biography explains much
of his tendency to see deconstruction as an embattled, even
quasi-revolutionary force: a dangerous truth that the men in
charge cannot stomach.