Derrida, Jacques

(1930- )

   philosopher

   Jacques Derrida, a leading contemporary French philosopher whose writings form the basis for the deconstructionist school, was born in El Biar, Algeria, and educated in Paris at the École normale supérieure, where he later taught. He was also a professor at the sorbonne and began his writings with essays on the Greeks, Hegelian phenomenology, and antimetaphysics. He questioned the primacy of the word, or "logo-centrism," as the common foundation of religion and metaphysics, and centered his work on a critique of "signs." Der-rida first put forth this philosophy in L'Écriture et la différence (1967), in La Voix et le phénomène (1967), and in De la Grammatologie (1967). His writings are also concerned with the human sciences (notably the fundamentals of linguistics and textology) and, after La Dissémination (1972), Marges de la philosophie (1972), and Glas (1974), which illustrate his theories on the author and the graphical juxtaposition of critical and literary texts apropos of G. W. F. Hegel and jean genet, he continued to write pro-lifically and to break with the classical modes of philosophic exposition (La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà, 1980; Droit de regard, a work of photographs with the Belgian photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, 1985). His detractors have accused Derrida of seeking to destroy reason, but his critical interpretation at all times seeks to achieve a synthesis among psychoanalysis (Résistances, 1996), Marxism (Spectres de Marx, 1993), and the ideas of Martin Heidegger (Heidegger et la question, 1990; Apories, 1996). Derrida's other writings include Schibboleth (1986), Antonin Artaud (1986), Parages (1986), and Signéponge (1988).