Jacques Derrida

Introduction

Jacques Derrida is the French-Algerian philosopher who founded deconstruction with three books published in 1967 — De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), L'écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference), and La voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena) — and produced one of the most influential bodies of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy. The Derridean corpus of more than seventy books and hundreds of essays transformed the study of writing, the metaphysics of presence, the philosophy of language, the engagement between philosophy and literature, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of law, and the contemporary engagement with politics, ethics, and the conditions of friendship and forgiveness.

Derrida's career was institutionally distinguished but always institutionally complicated. He taught at the École Normale Supérieure from 1964 to 1984 and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) from 1984 until his retirement. He held visiting positions at major American universities (Johns Hopkins, Yale, UC Irvine), and the American reception of his work — especially through the Yale School of literary critics (Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom) — made him one of the most-cited single thinkers in the late-twentieth-century American humanities. The conflicts surrounding his work — the famous Searle-Derrida exchange of 1977, the controversy over his honorary doctorate at Cambridge in 1992, the broader analytic-continental divide — made him also one of the most contested.

Life

Jackie (later Jacques) Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El Biar, a suburb of Algiers in then-French Algeria. The family was Sephardic Jewish; the wartime experience of antisemitic exclusion (Derrida was expelled from his lycée in 1942 under the Vichy laws that withdrew French citizenship from Algerian Jews) shaped his lifelong concerns with the conditions of citizenship, belonging, and the limits of national identity.

Derrida moved to France in 1949 to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, which he entered in 1952 after difficulty with the entrance examinations. The École years brought him into contact with Louis Althusser (his teacher), Michel Foucault, and the major French philosophical figures of the postwar period. He took his agrégation in 1956 and his diplome d'études supérieures with a thesis on Husserl supervised by Maurice de Gandillac.

Derrida spent 1956–57 at Harvard on a scholarship and began the engagement with Husserl that would produce his early work. The doctoral thesis on Husserl (eventually defended in 1980, fifteen years after he had produced his major work) was translated and published as Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962), which won the Prix Cavaillès and established Derrida's reputation in French philosophical circles.

The breakthrough year was 1967. The three books — Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena — appeared in close succession and transformed French intellectual life. Derrida was elected to the École Normale Supérieure in 1964 and to the EHESS in 1984; the American visiting positions at Johns Hopkins (where his 1966 conference paper Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences introduced him to American audiences) and subsequently at Yale, UC Irvine, and elsewhere made him a major figure in American literary and philosophical culture.

The institutional career was marked by controversy. The honorary doctorate at Cambridge in 1992 was opposed by twenty senior analytic philosophers (including W. V. O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and David Armstrong) on the grounds that Derrida's work failed to meet basic philosophical standards; the doctorate was eventually awarded after a college-wide vote, but the controversy shaped the Anglo-American reception of his work. The Searle-Derrida exchange of 1977 (over Derrida's reading of J. L. Austin) had similarly become a focal point for the analytic-continental divide.

Derrida died on October 9, 2004, in Paris of pancreatic cancer at age seventy-four.

The problem he worked on

Derrida's project across his career was the careful working out of the implications of the recognition that metaphysics of presence organizes Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger — and that this metaphysics cannot finally be escaped by direct opposition but must be carefully worked through (deconstructed) from within. The Western philosophical tradition, on Derrida's diagnosis, has been organized around a series of oppositions (presence/absence, speech/writing, soul/body, signified/signifier, nature/culture, philosophy/literature, masculine/feminine) in which the first term is treated as primary and the second as derivative, marginal, or supplementary. The dec onstructive analysis shows that the apparent priority of the first term depends on features of the second that the framework had marginalized; that the second term is necessary for the constitution of the first; that the apparent opposition is not a simple binary but a entanglement in which neither side can be cleanly separated from the other.

The term deconstruction (déconstruction) was Derrida's translation of Heidegger's Destruktion and Abbau; the framework is partly continuous with Heidegger's engagement with the history of metaphysics and partly an attempt to push beyond what Derrida took to be Heidegger's limitations. The deconstructive method does not produce a positive doctrine; it works through the readings of particular texts (Plato's Phaedrus, Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages, Husserl's Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Being and Time, the Western metaphysical canon at large) to expose the structures of the oppositions and to open the possibilities the oppositions had foreclosed.

Contributions

Of Grammatology

The 1967 De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) is Derrida's most influential single book. The book develops the deconstructive analysis of the Western metaphysics of presence through the analysis of the privileging of speech (phonē) over writing (gramme) that runs from Plato through Saussure. The argument: Western philosophy has treated speech as the natural, primary, immediate mode of meaning (the speaker is present to the meaning expressed; the audience is present to the speaker) and writing as the derivative, secondary, mediated supplement (writing operates in the absence of the author and the original audience). The analysis shows that the features Western philosophy had assigned exclusively to writing — absence, the structural possibility of being read in contexts the author did not anticipate, the mediation of meaning through the structural conditions of representation — are equally constitutive of speech; the apparent priority of speech over writing depends on the suppression of features that speech in fact shares with writing.

The substantive argument turns on the analysis of différance (a Derridean coinage that combines to differ and to defer). Meaning is constituted by the network of differences among signs (the Saussurean insight) and by the deferral of full presence (no sign is ever fully present to itself; every sign refers to other signs in a network that cannot be closed). The trace that one sign leaves on another, the conditions of any sign's intelligibility, the absence at the heart of any apparent presence — these are the features the Western metaphysics of presence had marginalized.

The part of the book is a detailed engagement with Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages and the Confessions. The reading shows the structural role of the supplement in Rousseau's account — the way that what Rousseau treats as derivative additions (writing, masturbation, the substitution of representation for direct experience) turn out to be conditions of the very thing they apparently supplement. The generalization: the logic of the supplement operates throughout the Western tradition as the structural feature that the metaphysics of presence had marginalized.

Speech and Phenomena

The 1967 La voix et le phénomène (Speech and Phenomena) is Derrida's engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. The book gives the deconstructive reading of Husserl's Logical Investigations, especially the First Investigation on the relation between expression (Ausdruck) and indication (Anzeichen) and the Fourth and Fifth Investigations on the structure of intentionality.

The argument: Husserl's framework presupposes the possibility of purely expressive speech in which the speaker is present to herself, the meaning is fully present to the speaker, and the conditions of indication and absence that characterize ordinary speech are bracketed. The deconstructive reading shows that this purely expressive speech is an impossible limit-case; the conditions of meaning that Husserl had relegated to ordinary indicative speech (the possibility of repetition, the structural absence that conditions any sign, the mediation through the network of differences) are equally operative in the pure expression Husserl had set up as the ideal.

The book has been particularly important in the Anglo-American reception of Derrida because of its sustained engagement with the analytic philosophy of language. The Searle-Derrida exchange of 1977 (over Derrida's reading of J. L. Austin in Signature Event Context, 1972) builds on the framework Speech and Phenomena had developed.

Writing and Difference

The 1967 L'écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference) is the collection of Derrida's essays from the early 1960s, including the Cogito and the History of Madness (his engagement with Foucault), Violence and Metaphysics (his engagement with Levinas), Freud and the Scene of Writing, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference paper that introduced Derrida to American audiences). The book is the most accessible introduction to the early Derridean framework and the site of his engagement with the major contemporaries (Foucault, Levinas, Bataille, Jabes, Artaud, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger).

The later work

Derrida's later corpus extends the deconstructive framework into engagement with politics, ethics, religion, the law, friendship, mourning, hospitality, forgiveness, the gift. The books include Glas (1974, the parallel reading of Hegel and Jean Genet), Specters of Marx (1993, the engagement with Marx after the collapse of the Eastern bloc), The Gift of Death (1992), Politics of Friendship (1994), The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008, posthumous). The late ethical-political work has been particularly influential on contemporary engagement with hospitality, immigration, the structure of democratic legitimacy, and the limits of the political.

Key works

• Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962)
• Of Grammatology (1967)
• Writing and Difference (1967)
• Speech and Phenomena (1967)
• Margins of Philosophy (1972)
• Dissemination (1972)
• Positions (1972)
• Glas (1974)
• The Post Card (1980)
• Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987)
• Specters of Marx (1993)
• The Gift of Death (1992)
• Politics of Friendship (1994)
• The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008, posthumous)

The Éditions du Seuil and Éditions Galilée editions are the standard French texts. The University of Chicago Press, Routledge, and Stanford University Press editions are the principal English translations.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Husserl (the early phenomenological framework Derrida engaged in his doctoral and early work); Heidegger (the major continental predecessor whose Destruktion of the metaphysics of presence Derrida inherited); Nietzsche (the predecessor in the genealogical analysis of Western metaphysics); Levinas (his close intellectual interlocutor whose Totality and Infinity the early Violence and Metaphysics engaged); Maurice Blanchot (the major French novelist and theorist whose work on writing and the limit shaped Derrida's literary sensibility); Sigmund Freud (the major engagement throughout the corpus); Ferdinand de Saussure (the linguistic framework Derrida adapted and exceeded).

Influenced: The American Yale School of literary criticism (Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom); the post-structuralist turn in literary studies, anthropology, and the broader humanities through the 1970s and 1980s; the post-colonial theory through Gayatri Spivak (whose translation of Of Grammatology in 1976 brought the work to English-language readers) and Edward Said; the feminist deconstruction through Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray; the legal theory through the critical legal studies movement and contemporary jurisprudence; the contemporary philosophy of religion through John Caputo (especially The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 1997), Richard Kearney; the Italian engagement through Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito; the contemporary political philosophy through Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Wendy Brown.

Reception

Derrida's reception has been and continuously contested. The breakthrough year of 1967 made him one of the major French intellectual figures of his generation; the American reception through the 1970s and 1980s made him one of the most-cited single thinkers in the late-twentieth-century American humanities. The controversies (the Searle exchange, the Cambridge doctorate, the broader analytic-continental divide) made the reception sharply contested in ways that other major French philosophers (Foucault, Bourdieu) did not produce.

The contemporary reception continues across multiple disciplines. The Derridean influence on contemporary literary theory, post-colonial studies, gender studies, queer theory, legal theory, religious studies, political theory, and continental philosophy generally makes Derrida one of the most-engaged thinkers of the last fifty years. The analytic engagement remains more contested but has gradually developed; Sam Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (2000), Marian Hobson's work, and the broader engagement with Derrida through the Derrida Today journal have produced more dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Benoit Peeters's Derrida: A Biography (2010), Geoffrey Bennington's Derrida scholarship (especially Jacques Derrida, 1991, co-authored with Derrida), Leonard Lawlor's Derrida and Husserl (2002), John Caputo's The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997), Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism (2008), Samir Haddad's Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (2013), and the work of Pheng Cheah, Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, and Michael Naas. The Derrida Today journal, the Derrida Seminars Translation Project (which is publishing the Derridean lecture courses), and the archive at UC Irvine anchor continuing scholarship. Active debates concern the relation between the early and late Derrida, the political dimensions of deconstruction, the substantive engagement with religion in the late work, and the contemporary applicability of deconstructive method in literary, legal, and political analysis.

Further reading

• Husserl — the early phenomenological predecessor
• Heidegger — the major continental predecessor whose Destruktion Derrida extended
• Levinas — the close intellectual interlocutor
• Nietzsche — the genealogical predecessor
• Foucault — the contemporary whose work Derrida engaged in Cogito and the History of Madness

The French-Algerian philosopher who founded deconstruction and produced one of the most influential bodies of late-twentieth-century continental philosophy.