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{{Redirect|Derrida|the documentary film|Derrida (film)|the physicist|Bernard Derrida}}
{{about||the approach to post-modern architecture|Deconstructivism|other uses}}
{{undue|date=August 2013}}
{{Multiple issues|
{{Over-quotation|date=November 2013}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2011}}
{{Infobox philosopher
{{Confusing|date=December 2013}}
|region = Western philosophy|
{{Technical|date=December 2013}}
|era = [[20th-century philosophy]]|
{{Lead too long|date=January 2014}}
|image = Derrida main.jpg
|caption =
|name = Jacques Derrida
|birth_name = Jackie Élie Derrida<ref name="Jackie">{{cite book|last=Peeters|first=Benoît|title=Derrida: A Biography|year=2012|publisher=Polity|pages=12–13|quote="Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home. [...] The boy's main forename was probably chosen because of Jackie Coogan ... When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister."}}. See also {{cite book|last=Bennington|first=Geoffrey|title=Jacques Derrida|year=1993|publisher=The University of Chicago Press|page=325|quote="1930 Birth of Jackie Derrida, July 15, in El-Biar (near Algiers, in a holiday house)."}}.</ref>
|birth_date = {{Birth date|1930|07|15}}
|birth_place = [[El Biar]], [[French Algeria]]
|death_date = {{Death date and age|2004|10|09|1930|07|15}}
|death_place = [[Paris]], [[France]]
|school_tradition = [[Continental philosophy]]
|notable_ideas = [[Deconstruction]]{{·}} [[Différance]]{{·}} [[Phallogocentrism]]{{·}} [[Free Play (Derrida)|Free Play]]{{·}} [[Archi-writing]]{{·}} [[Metaphysics of presence]]
|influences = [[Plato]]{{·}} [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]]{{·}} [[Martin Heidegger|Heidegger]]{{·}} [[Edmund Husserl|Husserl]]{{·}} [[Emmanuel Lévinas|Levinas]]{{·}} [[Maurice Blanchot|Blanchot]]{{·}} [[Antonin Artaud|Artaud]]{{·}} [[Roland Barthes|Barthes]]{{·}} [[Louis Althusser|Althusser]]{{·}} [[Georges Bataille|Bataille]]{{·}} [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]]{{·}} [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]{{·}} [[Claude Lévi-Strauss|Lévi-Strauss]]{{·}} [[James Joyce|Joyce]]{{·}} [[Stéphane Mallarmé|Mallarmé]]{{·}} [[Edmond Jabès|Jabès]]{{·}} [[Karl Marx|Marx]]{{·}} [[André Leroi-Gourhan|Leroi-Gourhan]]
|influenced = [[Richard Rorty]]{{·}} [[Paul de Man]]{{·}} [[Bernard Stiegler]]{{·}} [[Jean-Luc Nancy]]{{·}} [[Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]]{{·}} [[Ernesto Laclau]]{{·}} [[Chantal Mouffe]]{{·}} [[Judith Butler]]{{·}} [[Julia Kristeva]]{{·}} [[Louis Althusser]]{{·}} [[Peter Eisenman]]{{·}} [[Gayatri Spivak]]{{·}} [[John Caputo]]{{·}} [[Mario Kopić]]{{·}} [[Avital Ronell]]{{·}} [[Catherine Malabou]]{{·}} [[Geoffrey Hartman]]{{·}} [[J. Hillis Miller]]{{·}} [[Harold Bloom]]{{·}} [[Martin Hägglund]]{{·}} [[Simon Glendinning]]{{·}} [[Robert Magliola]]
|signature =
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}}
{{psychoanalysis}}
'''Deconstruction''' ({{lang-fr|déconstruction}}) is a form of philosophical and literary analysis derived principally from [[Jacques Derrida]]'s 1967 work ''[[Of Grammatology]]''.
'''Jacques Derrida''' ({{IPAc-en|ʒ|ɑː|k|_|ˈ|d|ɛr|ɨ|d|ə}}; {{IPA-fr|ʒak dɛʁida|lang}}; born '''Jackie Élie Derrida''';<ref name="Jackie">, pp. 12-13.</ref> July 15, 1930&nbsp;– October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher, born in [[French Algeria]]. Derrida is best known for developing a form of [[Semiotics|semiotic]] analysis known as [[deconstruction]]. He is one of the major figures associated with [[post-structuralism]] and [[postmodern philosophy]].<ref name="Bensmaia05"/><ref name="Poster88"/><ref name="Leitch96">Vincent B. Leitch ''Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows'', SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 27.</ref>
<ref>Derrida first used the term "Deconstruction" in his work “Of Grammatology”, French version, p. 25 (Les Editions de Minuit, 1967, ISBN 978-2-7073-0012-6). On this page Derrida states that the occidental history of sign is essentially theological with reference to Logocentrism. Derrida starts a [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]] approach of [[semiology]]. He states that the concept of sign and deconstruction work are always exposed to misunderstanding. He uses the term "méconnaissance" probably in reference to [[Jacques Lacan]] who rejected the belief that reality can be captured in language. In the same page Derrida states that he will try to demonstrate that there is no linguistic sign without writing.</ref>
In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including —in addition to philosophy and literature— law
<ref name="Derrida 1992pp3-67">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Mary Quaintance, eds., Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson| title = Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice| edition = 1st| year = 1992| publisher = Routledge| location = New York| isbn = 0810103974 | chapter = “Force of Law”| pages = 3–67 | url = http://books.google.pt/books/about/Deconstruction_and_the_Possibility_of_Ju.html?id=2qdBeWFUmJQC&redir_esc=y| quote = “A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process (...)deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Critical Legal Studies Movement">"[http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/CriticalTheory/critical2.htm Critical Legal Studies Movement]" in "The Bridge"</ref>
<ref>
[http://www.germanlawjournal.com/index.php?pageID=13&vol=6&no=1 GERMAN LAW JOURNAL, SPECIAL ISSUE: A DEDICATION TO JACQUES DERRIDA], Vol. 6 No. 1 Pages 1 - 243 1 January 2005
</ref>
anthropology
,<ref>"Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology",Rosalind C. Morris, Annual Review of Anthropology,Volume: 36 Pages: 355-389,2007
</ref>
historiography,<ref name="Edn. Routledge 2006">"Deconstructing History", published 1997, 2nd. Edn. Routledge, 2006)</ref> linguistics <ref name="Busch 2012">{{cite book| last1 = Busch| first1 =Brigitt | title = Linguistic Repertoire Revisited| journal = Applied Linguistics| year = 2012| publisher = Oxford University Press | location = Oxford| url = http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/10/04/applin.ams056.full }}</ref>), sociolinguisitcs,<ref>"The sociolinguistics of schooling: the relevance of Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin", Michael Evans, 01/2012; ISBN 978-3-0343-1009-3 In book: The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts, Publisher: Peter Lang, Editors: Edith Esch and Martin Solly, pp.31-46</ref> psychoanalysis, political theory, feminism, gay and lesbian studies. It also influenced artists <ref>e.g. "Doris Salcedo", Phaidon (2004)|"Hans Haacke", Phaidon (2000)</ref> and art critics,<ref>e.g. "The return of the real", Hal Foster, October - MIT Press (1996) | "Kant after Duchamp", Thierry de Duve, October - MIT Press (1996)|"Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry - Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975", Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October - MIT Press (2000)|"Perpetual Inventory", Rosalind E. Krauss, October - MIT Press, 2010</ref><ref>{{cite journal | title = Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author | journal = Human Studies | date = Mar 2009 | first = Antonio | last = Calcagno | volume = 32 | issue = 1 | pages = 33–51 | doi = 10.1007/s10746-009-9108-2}}</ref> architects, musicians,<ref>"Deconstruction in Music - The Jacques Derrida", Gerd Zacher Encounter, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, (2002)</ref> and film theory.


During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence upon the [[humanities]],<ref name="Culler08"/> particularly on [[anthropology]], [[sociology]], [[semiotics]], [[jurisprudence]], and [[literary theory]]. His work still has a major influence in the academe of [[Continental Europe]], [[South America]] and all countries where [[continental philosophy]] is predominant. His theories became crucial in debates around [[ontology]], [[epistemology]] (especially concerning [[social sciences]]), [[ethics]], [[aesthetics]], [[hermeneutics]], and the [[philosophy of language]]. Jacques Derrida's work also influenced architecture (in the form of [[deconstructivism]]), music,<ref>"Deconstruction in Music - The Jacques Derrida", Gerd Zacher Encounter, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, (2002)</ref> art,<ref>e.g. "Doris Salcedo", Phaidon (2004)|"Hans Haacke", Phaidon (2000)</ref> and art critics.<ref>e.g. "The return of the real", Hal Foster, October - MIT Press (1996) | "Kant after Duchamp", Thierry de Duve, October - MIT Press (1996)|"Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry - Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975", Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October - MIT Press (2000)|"Perpetual Inventory", Rosalind E. Krauss, October - MIT Press, 2010</ref> Derrida was said to "leave behind a legacy of himself as the 'originator' of deconstruction."<ref>{{cite journal | title = Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author | journal = Human Studies | date = Mar 2009 | first = Antonio | last = Calcagno | volume = 32 | issue = 1 | pages = 33–51 | doi = 10.1007/s10746-009-9108-2}}</ref>
A premise of deconstruction is that ''all'' of Western literature and philosophy implicitly relies on a [[metaphysics of presence]],<ref name="Derrida 1973pp4-5">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated with an Introduction by David B. Allison and Preface by Newton Garver| title = Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs| edition = 1st| year = 1973| publisher = Northwestern University Press| location = Evanston| isbn = 0810103974 | chapter = Introduction| pages = 4–5 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Speech_and_Phenomena_and_Other_Essays_on.html?id=N4v2AkGMnqcC| quote = We have thus a prescription for the most general form of our question: do not phenomenological necessity, the rigor and subtlety of Husserl's analysis, the exigencies to which it responds and which we must first recognize, nonetheless conceal a metaphysical presupposition? Do they not harbor a dogmatic or speculative commitment which, to be sure, would not keep the phenomenological critique from being realized, would not be a residue of unperceived naivety, but would constitute phenomenology from within, in its project of criticism and in the instructive value of its own premises? This would be done precisely in what soon comes to be recognized as the source and guarantee of all value, the "principle of principles": i.e., the original self-giving evidence, the present or presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition. In other words, we shall not be asking whether such and such metaphysical heritage has been able, here or there, to restrict the vigilance of the phenomenologist, but whether the phenomenological form of this vigilance is not already controlled by metaphysics itself.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida W&D">
{{cite book | last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass| title = Writing and Difference| edition = Taylor & Francis e-Library| year = 2005| publisher = Routledge| location = London| isbn = 0203991788| chapter = Chapter 10: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences| pages = 353| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Writing_and_Difference.html?id=nsyH7x41RpsC| quote = If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix-if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to come more quickly to my principal theme-is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence—''eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia'' (essence, existence, substance, subject) ''aletheia'', transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.}}
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where intrinsic meaning is accessible by virtue of pure presence.
<ref name="Derrida 1981 p19">
{{cite book | last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| chapter = Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva| page = 19| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC| quote = Now, "everyday language" is not innocent or neutral. It is the language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although little attended to, are knotted into a system...the equation of the signatum and the concept (p. 99 [by Saussure]), inherently leaves open the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signifiers. By leaving open this possibility-and it is inherent even in the opposition signifier/signified, that is in the sign-Saussure contradicts the critical acquisitions of which we were just speaking. He accedes to the classical exigency of what I have proposed to call a "transcendental signified," which in and of itself, in its essence, would refer to no signifier...}}
</ref>
<ref name="Evans 1991pp.xix-xx">
{{cite book| last1 = Evans | first1 = J. Claude| title = Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice| edition = 1st| year = 1991| publisher = University of Minnesota Press| location = Minneapolis| isbn = 0816619255| pages = xix-xx| url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=0aHK3vOo8HkC| quote = There is no primal experience we can simply turn to, no neutral language, no neutral critical tools. We thus have to dismantle an understanding of Being that determines our entire epoch, an understanding that has covered over the originary experience of Being to be retrieved. This understanding of Being Heidegger calls the "metaphysics of presence," a prejudice that operates on two levels. On the level of our own self-understanding, it leads us to understand ourselves in terms of the present and neglect our being-toward-the-future...And...to a second level: we identify Being itself with presence. What is real is what is present to us in the present. What is past is not any more; what is future is not yet. Being is experienced as what is available and thus manipulable in the present. Heidegger, however, claims that the very presence of something as something is conditioned by an absence (Being) that makes that presence itself possible. The task of deconstruction is the task of retrieving the experience of this absence that makes presence possible. Derrida takes up this Heideggerian project, but radicalizes it. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not appeal to a more primordial living experience or to Being, for to speak of such an experience is inevitably to appeal to a kind of presence...}}
</ref>
Deconstruction denies the possibility of a pure presence and thus of essential or intrinsic and stable meaning — and thus a relinquishment of the notions of absolute truth, unmediated access to "reality" and consequently of conceptual hierarchy. "From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs."
<ref name="Derrida 1997p50">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| chapter = Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing| page = 50 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency is recognized in the absoluteness of its right. One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1997p48">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| chapter = Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing| page = 48 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = ...the genetic root-system refers-from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification-understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth-stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1997p62">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| chapter = Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing| page = 62 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = On the one hand, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form...Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1981p27">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 27| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC| quote = Differance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of differance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.}}</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1997pp62-63">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| pages = 62–63 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/ signifier,content/expression, etc.), concept or opearation, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order-a phonic or graphic text for example-or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing-in the colloquial sense-as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the inteligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived "notation " would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1981p26">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 26| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC| quote = The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each "element"-phoneme or grapheme-being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida W&Dp353">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass| title = Writing and Difference| edition = Taylor & Francis e-Library| year = 2005| publisher = Routledge| location = London| isbn = 0203991788| chapter = Chapter 10: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences| pages = 353–354| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Writing_and_Difference.html?id=nsyH7x41RpsC| quote = Henceforth, it became necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a center in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence-but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. The substitute does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Reynolds & Roffe 2004p7">
{{cite book| editor1-last = Reynolds | editor1-first = Jack| editor1-last = Roffe| editor1-first = Jonathan| last1 = Glendinning | first1 = Simon| title = Understanding Derrida| chapter = Chapter Two: Language | edition = 1st| year = 2004| publisher = Continuum| location = New York| isbn = 0826473164| page = 7 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=D7jq50nVzGA| quote = What Derrida aims to show is that there never was nor could there be such an order of pure intelligibility, no logos or meaning that would be an ideal presence, pre-existing and occult...}}
</ref>
Language, considered as a system of signs, as Saussure says
,<ref name="Saussure 1916 trans. 1959 121–22">{{cite book|last=Saussure|first=Ferdinand de|title=Course in General Linguistics|year=1916 [trans. 1959]|publisher=New York Philosophical Library|location=New York|pages=121–22|url=http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/saussure.htm}}</ref>
is nothing but differences. Words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words. 'Red' means what it does only by contrast with 'blue', 'green', etc. 'Being' also means nothing except by contrast, not only with 'beings' but with 'Nature', 'God', 'Humanity', and indeed every other word in the language. No word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form).
<ref name="Rorty et al 1995">
{{cite book | last1 = Rorty | first1 = Richard | title = From Formalism to Poststructuralism | chapter = Deconstructionist Theory| volume = 8 | year = 1995 | publisher = Cambridge University Press | url = http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/rorty.html| quote = That is, words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words. 'Red' means what it does only by contrast with 'blue', 'green', etc. 'Being' also means nothing except by contrast, not only with 'beings' but with 'Nature', 'God', 'Humanity', and indeed every other word in the language. No word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might -- by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)(...)<br>This is not, of course, to say that there is no such thing as linguistic reference to non-language. But merely to repeat Wittgenstein's point that ostensive definition requires a lot of 'stage-setting'. The common-sense claim that 'There's a rabbit' is typically uttered in the presence of rabbits is undermined neither by Wittgenstein's point, nor by Quine's arguments about the inscrutability of reference, nor by Derrida's about the tendency of the signifier to slip away from the signified. For the impact of such arguments on the notion of meaning, see Stout, 'Meaning', and Wheeler, 'Extension'. }}
</ref>
Derrida terms [[logocentrism]] the philosophical commitment to pure, unmediated, presence as a source of self-sufficient meaning.
<ref name="Rorty et al 1995-2">
{{cite book | last1 = Rorty | first1 = Richard | title = From Formalism to Poststructuralism | chapter = Deconstructionist Theory| volume = 8 | year = 1995 | publisher = Cambridge University Press | url = http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/rorty.html| quote =Derrida says of the logocentric philosophers who hold out this hope of immediacy: 'Univocity is the essence, or better, the telos of language. No philosophy has ever renounced this Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is philosophy.' (Margins, p. 247) To succeed in twisting free of the logocentric tradition would be to write, and to read, in such a way as to renounce this ideal. To destroy the tradition would be to see all the texts of that tradition as self-delusive, because using language to do what language cannot do. Language itself, so to speak, can be relied upon to betray any attempt to transcend it (see Derrida, Writing, pp. 278-81).}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1997p12">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| chapter = Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing| page = 12 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with the historical determination of the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/essence/existence ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity, the co-presence of the other and of the self, intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego, and so forth). Logocentrism would thus support the determination of the being of the entity as presence. To the extent that such a Logocentrism is not totally absent from Heidegger's thought, perhaps it still holds that thought within the epoch of onto-theology, within the philosophy of presence, that is to say within philosophy itself.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1997p7">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak| title = Of Grammatology| edition = Corrected Edition| year = 1997| publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press| location = Baltimore| isbn = 0801858305| chapter = Chapter 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing| page = 7 | url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=95ZyM7vujG0C| quote = The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game. There is not a single signified that escapes the play of differance.}}
</ref>
Due to this impossibility of pure presence and consequently of intrinsic meaning, any given concept is constituted in reciprocal determination,in terms of its ''oppositions'', e.g. perception/reason, speech/writing, mind/body, interior/exterior, marginal/central, sensible/intelligible, intuition/signification, nature/culture.
<ref name="Derrida 2005p276">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass| title = Writing and Difference| edition = Taylor & Francis e-Library| year = 2005| publisher = Routledge| location = London| isbn = 0203991788| chapter = Chapter 7: Freud and the Scene of Writing | page = 276| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Writing_and_Difference.html?id=nsyH7x41RpsC| quote = The model of hieroglyphic writing assembles more strikingly—though we find it in every form of writing—the diversity of the modes and functions of signs in dreams. Every sign—verbal or otherwise—may be used at different levels, in configurations and functions which are never prescribed by its “essence,” but emerge from a play of differences.}}
</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1981p133">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 26| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC| quote = At the point at which the concept of differance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of differance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to differance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.}}
</ref>


Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes present in his work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements.<ref name=kandell2004 /> Derrida became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious difficulty of his work made him controversial.<ref name=kandell2004 /><ref name="stanford">[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/ "Jacques Derrida"]. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. November 22, 2006. Accessed August 11, 2010.</ref>
Further, Derrida contends that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc.
<ref name="Derrida 1981p41">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 41| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC| quote = ...in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.}}
</ref>
The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc, would be to overturn these oppositions. But it is not that the final objective of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. But this only points to "the necessity of an interminable analysis" that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts.
<ref name="Derrida 1981p41-02">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| chapter="Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta"| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 41| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC|quote = When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.}}
</ref>


==Life==
Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to deconstruction to expose the way oppositions work and how meaning and values are produced and stop there in a nihilistic or cynic position regarding all meaning, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".
Derrida was born at daybreak on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in [[El Biar]] ([[Algiers]]), [[French Algeria]], into a [[Sephardic]] Jewish family originally from [[Toledo, Spain|Toledo]] that became French in 1870 when the [[Crémieux Decree]] granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of French Algeria.<ref>"I took part in the extraordinary transformation of the Algerian Jews; my great-grandparents were by language, custom, etc., still identified with Arabic culture. After the Cremieux Decree (1870), at the end of the 19th c., the following generation became bourgeois", ''[http://www.studiovisit.net/SV.Derrida.pdf Jacques Derrida The Last Interview]'', May 2003.</ref> His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970)<ref>{{cite web|url=http://gw4.geneanet.org/index.php3?b=michelzaffran&lang=fr;p=haim+aaron+prosper+charles+aime;n=derrida |title=Haim, Aaron, Prosper, Charles, Aimé Aimé, Mémé - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc... - GeneaNet |publisher=Gw4.geneanet.org |date=18 January 2012 |accessdate=21 October 2012}}</ref> and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991),<ref>{{cite web|author=&nbsp; Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR |url=http://gw4.geneanet.org/index.php3?b=michelzaffran&lang=fr;p=georgette+sultana+esther;n=safar |title=Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc... - GeneaNet |publisher=Gw4.geneanet.org |date=18 January 2012 |accessdate=21 October 2012}}</ref><ref name="Bennington91p325">Bennington (1991), p. 325</ref><ref>"Safar surname: occupational name from Arabic ''saffar'' which means ''worker in copper or brass''", [http://www.ancestry.com/facts/Safar-family-history-uk.ashx The Safar surname]"</ref> named him Jackie, "which they considered to be an American name," though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor [[Jackie Coogan]], who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 [[Charlie Chaplin]] film ''[[The Kid (1921 film)|The Kid]].''<ref name="Powell 2006, p. 12">Powell (2006), p. 12.</ref><ref>[http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1324460,00.html Obituary in ''The Guardian''], accessed August 2, 2007.</ref><ref>Cixous (2001), p. vii; also see this [http://www.themodernword.com/features/interview_caputo.html interview with Derrida's long-term collaborator John Caputo].</ref> He was also given the middle name [[Élie]], named after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision when he was seven days old; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name."<ref name="Circumfession">{{cite book|last=Peeters|first=Benoît|title=Derrida: A Biography|year=2012|publisher=Polity|page=13|quote="When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister."}} See also {{cite book|last=Derrida|first=Jacques|title=Jacques Derrida|chapter="Circumfession"|year=1993|publisher=The University of Chicago Press|page=96|quote="'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written (12-23-76)' the name of the prophet Élie, Elijah in English ... so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou Derrida ..."}}</ref>
<ref name="Derrida 1981p42">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| chapter= "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta,"| edition = 1st| year = 1981| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| page = 41| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC|quote =Therefore one might not proceed too quickly to a neutralization that in practice would leave the previous field untouched, leaving one no hold on the previous opposition, thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively. We know what always have been the practical (particularly political) effects of Immediately jumping beyond oppositions, and of protests in the simple form of neither this nor that.}}
</ref>
To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics (e.g. [[Différance]], [[Archi-writing]], [[Pharmakon (philosophy)]], supplement, [[Hymen]], [[gram]], spacing) .


Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life that he was a replacement for his deceased brother.''<ref name="Powell 2006, p. 12"/>'' His youth was spent in Algiers and El-Biar.
==Etymology==
Although he avoided defining the term directly, Derrida sought to apply [[Martin Heidegger]]'s concept of ''[[Destruktion]]'' or ''Abbau'', to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.<ref name="Heidegger27S21-23">[[Martin Heidegger]] (1927) ''[[Being and Time]]'', [http://books.google.com/books?id=S57m5gW0L-MC Introduction], part II.5, § 21-23</ref> Derrida opted for ''deconstruction'' over the literal translation ''destruction'' to suggest precision rather than violence.{{Citation needed|date=December 2013}}


On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his [[lycée]] by French administrators implementing [[antisemitism|anti-Semitic]] quotas set by the [[Vichy France|Vichy]] government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous [[association football|football]] competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], and [[André Gide|Gide]] an instrument of revolt against the family and society:<ref name="TeenBooks"/>
To situate deconstruction within philosophy in general, it is a form of [[Foundationalism|antifoundationalism]].<ref name="Brint et al 1995">{{cite journal | last1 = Brint | first1 = Michael | last2 = Weaver | first2 = William G. | last3 = Garmon | first3 = Meredith | title = What Difference Does Anti-Foundationalism Make to Political Theory? | journal = New Literary History | volume = 26 | issue = 2 | pages = 225–237 | year = 1995 | publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press | url = http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057280 }}
</ref>
<ref name="Gottdiener 1993">{{cite journal | last1 = M. Gottdiener | first1 = M. | title = Ideology, Foundationalism, and Sociological Theory | journal = The Sociological Quarterly | volume = 34 | issue = 4 | pages = 653–671 |date=November 1993 | publisher = Wiley | url = http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121373 }}</ref>
and a critique of the idialistic component of systems commonly designated as [[Idealism]], but that can also be found at times in philosophies that proclaim themselves to be anti-idealistic, as "materialisms", analytic philosophy
,<ref name="Afterwordsp133">Derrida argued in Limited inc. about the problem he found in the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition from which Austin and Searle were only paradigmatic examples.{{quotation| In the description of the structure called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal,"this possibility must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensably about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general(...) what is "nonfiction standard discourse," what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive "parasitism," is always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)?
<br> This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its fictional"parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional.}}
</ref>
or in discourses that declare themselves alien to philosophy. Derrida argues that all discourse involves this effect of idealism in a certain manner
.<ref name="Derrida 1980pp93-94">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida | first1 = Jacques| others = edited by Gerald Graff| title = Limited Inc| edition = 1st| year = 1988| publisher = Northwestern University Press| location = Evanston| isbn = 0810107880| pages = 93–94| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Limited_Inc.html?id=KxT4e4_EtO8C| quote = Metaphysics in its most traditional form reigns over the Austinian heritage: over his legacy and over those who have taken charge of it as his heirs apparent. Two indications bear witness to this: <br>1. The hierarchical axiology, the ethicalontological distinctions which do not merely set up value-oppositions clustered around an ideal and unfindable limit, but moreover subordinate these values to each other (normal/abnormal, standard/parasite, fulfilled/void, serious/nonserious, literal/nonliteral, briefly: positive/negative and ideal/non-ideal); and in this,...there is metaphysical pathos (infelicity, nonserious, etc....).<br>2. The enterprise of returning "strategically," ideally, to an origin or to a "priority" held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from [[Plato]] to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent. In Sec (as in its entire context) this force is not ignored but rather put into question, traced back to that which deploys it while at the same time limiting it. Although this "exigency" ["''[[wikt:requête|requête]]''"] is here essentially "idealistic" I do not criticize it as such, but rather ask myself what this idealism is, what its force and its necessity are, and where its intrinsic limit is to be found. Nor is this idealism the exclusive property of those systems commonly designated as "idealistic." It can be found at times in philosophies that proclaim themselves to be anti-idealistic, in "materialisms." Or in discourses that declare themselves alien to philosophy. All discourse involves this effect of idealism in a certain manner.}}</ref>
In terms of heritage, style and conceptual framework (namely [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenological]]
<ref name="Derrida 1981pp9-10">
{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| others = translated and annotated by Alan Bass| title = Positions| edition = 1st| year = 1981
| publisher = The University of Chicago Press| location = Chicago| isbn = 0226143317| pages = 9–10| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Positions.html?id=OCJonuW4L_EC}}
</ref>
<ref name="Braver 2007p433">{{cite book| last1 = Braver| first1 = Lee| title = A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism| edition = 1st| year = 2007| publisher = Northwestern University Press| location = Evanston| isbn = 0810123797| page = 433| url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=YIG-HyP3tesC}}</ref> Deconstruction is within the [[Continental philosophy|Continental]]—as opposed to [[Analytic philosophy|analytical]]—tradition of philosophy.<ref name="Braver 2007pp431-434">{{cite book| last1 = Braver| first1 = Lee| title = A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism | edition = 1st| year = 2007| publisher = Northwestern University Press| location = Evanston| isbn = 0810123797 | pages = 431–434| url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=YIG-HyP3tesC}}</ref>Make introduction m
==On deconstruction==


His readings also included [[Albert Camus|Camus]] and [[Sartre]].<ref name = "TeenBooks" /> On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met [[Louis Althusser]], with whom he became friends. After visiting the [[Husserl-Archives Leuven|Husserl Archive]] in [[Leuven]], Belgium, he completed his [[master's degree]] in Philosophy (''diplôme d'études supérieures'') on [[Edmund Husserl]]. He then achieved the highly competitive ''[[agrégation]]'' exam. Derrida received a grant for studies at [[Harvard University]], and he spent the 1956–7 academic year reading [[James Joyce|Joyce]]'s ''[[Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]'' at the [[Widener Library]].<ref name = "Caputo97P25">Caputo (1997), p. 25.</ref> In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in [[Boston]]. During the [[Algerian War of Independence]], Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.
===Derrida's approach to literary criticism===
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary complexity of [[semiotics]], and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the [[aporia]]s and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.<ref>[[Rodolphe Gasché]], "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in [[John Sallis]] (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Philosophy'' (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:


Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]], where he was assistant of [[Suzanne Bachelard]] (daughter of Gaston), [[Canguilhem]], [[Paul Ricœur]] (who in these years coined the term ''[[School of suspicion]]'') and [[Jean Wahl]].<ref>Bennington (1991), p. 330</ref> His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, [[Pierre Alféri|Pierre]], in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of [[Althusser]] and [[Jean Hyppolite]], Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the [[École Normale Supérieure]], which he kept until 1984.<ref name="Powell06p34-5"/><ref name="Powell06p58"/> In 1965 Derrida began an association with the ''[[Tel Quel]]'' group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.<ref name="Powell06p58">Powell (2006), p. 58</ref> Derrida's subsequent distance from the ''Tel Quel'' group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of [[Maoism]] and the Chinese [[Cultural Revolution]].<ref>Leslie Hill, ''The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 55.</ref>
{{quotation|One of the more persistent misunderstandings that has thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect, and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [...] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to "account," in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the ''successful'' development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.}}</ref>


With [[Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]], his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on [[structuralism]] at [[Johns Hopkins University]], his work began to assume international prominence. At the same colloquium, Derrida would meet [[Jacques Lacan]] and [[Paul de Man]], the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come.<ref>Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, ''Jacques Derrida'', Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 331</ref> A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—''[[Writing and Difference]]'', ''[[Speech and Phenomena]]'', and ''[[Of Grammatology]]''.
Deconstruction denotes the [[Hermeneutics|pursuing of the meaning]] of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in [[literary analysis]], and even in the analysis of scientific writings.<ref>Marian Hobson, [http://books.google.gr/books?id=Kl146cNpzNQC&vq= ''Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines''], Routledge, 2012, p. 51.</ref> Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an "aporia" in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed "aporetic."<ref>Mark Currie, [http://books.google.gr/books?id=i3ecdVgknGkC&source=gbs_navlinks_s ''The Invention of Deconstruction''], Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 80.</ref> He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is.<ref>Ramberg, Bjørn and Kristin Gjesdal, [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#Semiotics "Hermeneutics"], Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, 2005.</ref>


He completed his [[Doctor of Letters|D. Litt.]] (''doctorat d'État'') in 1980, submitting his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project; the text of Derrida's defense was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In 1983 Derrida collaborated with [[Ken McMullen (film director)|Ken McMullen]] on the film ''[[Ghost Dance (film)|Ghost Dance]]''. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name "deconstruction," on the grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.


Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida was full professor (''directeur d'études'') at the [[École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales]] in Paris. With [[François Châtelet]] and others he in 1983 co-founded the [[Collège international de philosophie]] (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 [[Sylviane Agacinski]] gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.<ref name="Guardian20041011">[http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2004/oct/11/guardianobituaries.france "Obituary: Jacques Derrida"], by Derek Attridge and Thomas Baldwin, ''[[The Guardian]]'', October 11, 2004. Retrieved Jan 19, 2010.</ref>
===Basic philosophical concerns===
Derrida’s concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:


In 1986, Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the [[University of California, Irvine]], where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although the suit was dropped in 2007.<ref>[http://www.continental-philosophy.org/2007/02/15/uc-irvine-drops-suit-over-derridas-personal-papers/ UC Irvine drops suit over Derrida's personal papers]</ref>
1. A desire to contribute to the re-valuation of all western values, built on the 18th century Kantian critique of reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]].


He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including [[Johns Hopkins University]], [[Yale University]], [[New York University]], [[Stony Brook University]], [[The New School for Social Research]], and [[European Graduate School]].
2. An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.


He was awarded honorary doctorates by the [[University of Cambridge]] (1992), [[Columbia University]], [[The New School for Social Research]], the [[University of Essex]], [[Katholieke Universiteit Leuven]], and [[University of Silesia]].
3. A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity, [[episteme]] vs. [[techne]], etc.


Derrida has often been criticized by academics, such as the [[analytic philosophy|analytic]] philosopher [[Willard Van Orman Quine]].<ref name="DUlisse">J.E. D'Ulisse ''[http://www.newpartisan.com/home/derrida-1930-2004.html Derrida (1930–2004)]'', ''New Partisan'' December 24, 2004 Quote: "Academic conservatives attack Derrida for his position on objectivity ... W.V.O. Quine ... his status as a good Republican"</ref> In 1992, a number of [[analytical philosophers]] from Cambridge University and external institutions, headed by [[Barry Smith (academic and ontologist)|Barry Smith]] editor of ''[[The Monist]]'', tried to stop the granting of the degree,<ref name="BarrySmithEtAl">Barry Smith et al. ''[http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/Derrida_Letter.htm Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University]'', ''[[The Times]]'' (London), Saturday, May 9, 1992</ref> but were outnumbered when it was put to a vote.<ref name="prelectur.stanford.edu">[[John Rawlings]] (1999) [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/ Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction] at [[Stanford University]]</ref>
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the western metaphysical tradition.<ref name="PostModernPlatos">''Post-Modern Platos'' by Catherine H. Zuckert, Chigago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, chapter 7.</ref> Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves stuck in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."<ref name="CambridgeInterviewOct92"/><ref name="Derrida90Liberation">Derrida (1990) ''Once Again from the Top'', p. 332</ref>


Derrida was a member of the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]]. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected;{{citation needed|date=March 2011}} he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology). He received the 2001 [[:De:Theodor-W.-Adorno-Preis|Adorno-Preis]] from the [[Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main|University of Frankfurt]].
===Deconstruction in relation to Nietzsche's philosophy===
In order to understand Derrida’s motivation, one must refer to Nietzsche's philosophy.


Late in his life, Derrida participated in two biographical documentaries, ''D'ailleurs, Derrida'' [''Derrida's Elsewhere''] by Saafa Fathy (1999),<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356496/ IMDb]</ref> and ''[[Derrida (film)|Derrida]]'' by [[Kirby Dick]] and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).<ref>[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303326/ IMDb]</ref>
Nietzsche's project began with Orpheus, the man underground. This foil to Platonic light was deliberately and self-consciously lauded in ''Daybreak'', when Nietzsche announces, albeit retrospectively, “In this work you will discover a subterranean man at work,” and then goes on to map the project of unreason: “All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?”<ref>''Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality''. Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollisdale. Cambridge University Press, 1997.</ref>


In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with [[pancreatic cancer]], which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.<ref>[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21050-2004Oct9.html, Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher], accessed May 9, 2012.</ref>
Nietzsche’s point in ''Daybreak'' is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to be deceived by the illusion of reason any more. Reason, logic, philosophy and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. And so Nietzsche decides to throw it in our faces, and uncover the truth of Plato, that he —unlike Orpheus— just happened to discover his true love in the light instead of in the dark. This being merely one historical event amongst many, Nietzsche proposes that we revisualize the history of the west as the history of a series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the will to power, that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling our attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of Orpheus, the man underground, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize us to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship. For example, the political influences that led one author to choose philosophy over poetry (or at least ''portray'' himself as having made such a choice), and another to make a different choice.


At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to [[University of Heidelberg|Heidelberg]] as holder of the [[Hans-Georg Gadamer|Gadamer]] professorship,<ref name="uni-heidelberg.de">"[http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/press/news/press358_e.html The University of Heidelberg Mourns the Death of Jacques Derrida]"</ref> whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Prof. Dr. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."<ref name="uni-heidelberg.de"/>
The problem with Nietzsche, as Derrida sees it, is that he did not go far enough. That he missed the fact that this will to power is itself but a manifestation of the operation of writing. And so Derrida wishes to help us step beyond Nietzsche’s penultimate revaluation of all western values, to the ultimate, which is the final appreciation of “the role of writing in the production of knowledge.”<ref name="PostModernPlatos" />


==Philosophy==
=== From différance to deconstruction ===
{{Main|Deconstruction}}
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all [[discourse]] has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in [[Non-essentialism|non-essentialist]] terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of [[differences|difference]] inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text, in a broad sense,<ref name="Royle04p62">[[Nicholas Royle|Royle, Nicholas]] (2004) [http://books.google.com/books?id=nNaSdb9VMTwC ''Jacques Derrida''], Routledge, 2003, pp. 62–63</ref><ref name="Ferraris97p76">Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76:
On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as a historian.<ref name="Afterword88P130" /><ref name="LitHistorian">Derrida (1989) ''This Strange Institution Called Literature'', p. 54: {{quotation|Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [...] Deconstruction calls for a highly "historian's" attitude (''Of Grammatology'', for example, is a history book through and through).}}</ref> Derrida questioned assumptions of the [[Western philosophical tradition]] and also more broadly [[Western culture]].<ref name="NationObituaries"/> By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to [[democratize]] the university scene and to politicize it.<ref name="CambridgeInterviewOct92">Derrida (1992) ''Cambridge Review'', pp. 404, 408–13.</ref> During the [[American 1980s culture wars]], this would attract the anger of [[politically conservative]] and right-wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.<ref name="Culler08">[[Jonathan Culler]] (2008) ''[http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Jan08/JonathanCuller.html Why deconstruction still matters: A conversation with Jonathan Culler]'', interviewed by Paul Sawyer for ''The Cornell Chronicle'', Jan. 24, 2008</ref><ref name="CambridgeInterviewOct92"/><ref name="NationObituaries"/><ref name="Afterword88P147">Derrida (1988) ''Afterword'', p. 147</ref>


Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of [[Western culture]] "[[deconstruction]]".<ref name="NationObituaries"/> On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of [[Marxism]].<ref>Derrida (1976) ''Where a Teaching Body Begins'', English translation 2002, p. 72</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last = Derrida|year = 1993|title = Spectres of Marx|page = 92|language = French|postscript = <!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}</ref>
{{quotation|I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.}}</ref> emerges from [[semiology]] advanced by [[Ferdinand de Saussure]].


Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine the [[binary opposition]]s, hierarchies, and [[paradoxes]] on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded. Derrida saw deconstruction as a challenge to unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition.<ref name="NationObituaries"/> Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text, in a broad sense,<ref name="Royle04p62">[[Nicholas Royle|Royle, Nicholas]] (2004) [http://books.google.com/books?id=nNaSdb9VMTwC ''Jacques Derrida''], pp. 62–63</ref><ref name="Ferraris97p76">Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of [[structuralism]] when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
{{quotation|I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.}}</ref> emerges from [[semiology]] advanced by [[Ferdinand de Saussure]]. Saussure is considered one of the fathers of [[structuralism]] and he posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.<ref>{{cite book|last=Saussure|first=Ferdinand de|title=Course in General Linguistics|year=1916 [trans. 1959]|publisher=New York Philosophical Library|location=New York|pages=121–22|url=http://faculty.smu.edu/dfoster/cf3324/saussure.htm}}
{{quotation|In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.}}</ref>


Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion,<ref name="Royle04p62"/> which appears in an essay on [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]] in his book ''[[Of Grammatology]]'' (1967),<ref name="Derrida67p158">Derrida (1967) ''Of Grammatology'', Part II ''Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau,"'' section 2 "...''That Dangerous Supplement''...", title ''The Exorbitant. Question of Method'', pp. 158–59, 163</ref> is the statement that "there is nothing outside the text" (''il n'y a pas de hors-texte'').<ref name="Derrida67p158"/> Critics of Derrida have quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction.<ref name="Afterword88P136"/><ref name="Reilly05">Reilly, Brian J. (2005) ''Jacques Derrida'', in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.</ref><ref name="Coward90">Coward, Harold G. (1990) [http://books.google.com/books?id=JtyqhtCW7jQC ''Derrida and Indian philosophy''], pp. 83, 137</ref><ref name="Pidgen90">Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) ''On a defence of derrida'', in [http://books.google.com/books?id=M71ZAAAAMAAJ ''The Critical review''] (1990) Issues 30–32, pp. 40–41</ref><ref name=wpost04Sullivan>Sullivan, Patricia (2004) [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21050-2004Oct9.html ''Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher''], in ''[[Washington Post]]'', October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007.</ref> Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."<ref name="Afterword88P136">Derrida (1988) ''Afterword'', p. 136</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Glendinning|first=Simon|title=Jacques Derrida: A Very Short Introduction|year=2011|publisher=Oxford University Press}}</ref>
<blockquote>In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.<ref name="Saussure 1916 trans. 1959 121–22"/></blockquote>


===Early works===
Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, of a science of signs in general, being human codes only one among others. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, he made of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone".<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 21:
At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]]. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his ''diplôme d'études supérieures'' and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of [[Edmund Husserl]].<ref>The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title ''Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl''. English translation: ''The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy'' (2003).</ref> In 1962 he published ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'', which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in ''[[Positions]]'' (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of ''Speech and Phenomena''."<ref name="67RonseP5">Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 5</ref>
{{quotation|Although Saussure recognized the necessity of putting the phonic substance between brackets ("What is essential in language, we shall see, is foreign to the phonic character of the linguistic sign" [po 21]. "In its essence it [the linguistic signifier] is not at all phonic" [po 164]), Saussure, for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, everything that links the sign to phone. He also speaks of the "natural link" between thought and voice, meaning and sound (p. 46). He even speaks of "thought-sound" (p. 156). I have attempted elsewhere to show what is traditional in such a gesture, and to what necessities it submits. In any event, it winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part. The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology: "Thus it can be said that entirely arbitrary signs realize better than any others the ideal of the semiological process; this is why language, the most complex and most widespread of the systems of expression, is also the most characteristic one of them all; in this sense linguistics can become the general pattern for all semiology, even though language is only a particular system" (p. 101). One finds exactly the same gesture and the same concepts in Hegel. The contradiction between these two moments of the Course is also marked by Saussure's recognizing elsewhere that "it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs ... ," that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation, independent of any substance, for example, phonic substance.}}</ref> Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working every where there is a relation to something else.


Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at [[Johns Hopkins University]] in 1966 (and subsequently included in ''Writing and Difference''). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with [[structuralism]], then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations;{{Page needed|date=March 2011}} this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of [[post-structuralism]].<ref name="Bensmaia05">Bensmaïa, Réda ''Poststructuralism'', in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93</ref><ref name="Poster88">Poster (1988), pp. 5–6</ref><ref>
Derrida then sees these differences, as elemental oppositions (0-1), working in all "languages", all "systems of distinct signs", all "codes", where terms do not have an"absolute" meaning, but can only get it from reciprocal determination with the other terms (1-0). This structural difference is the first component that Derrida will take into account when articulating the meaning of ''[[différance]]'', a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his life long work, deconstruction:<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 p. 21">Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 27: {{quotation|Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function. It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain-which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech.}}</ref>
{{quotation|(...) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of [[metaphysics]], like the history of the West, is the history of these [[metaphor]]s and [[metonymy|metonymies]]. Its matrix [...] is the determination of [[Being]] as ''presence'' in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – ''[[eidos (philosophy)|eidos]]'', ''[[archē]]'', ''[[telos (philosophy)|telos]]'', ''[[energeia]]'', ''[[ousia]]'' (essence, existence, substance, subject), ''[[aletheia|alētheia]]'', transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.|"Structure, Sign and Play" in ''Writing and Difference'', p. 353.}}</ref>
{{quotation|1) ''Différance'' is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the ''a'' of ''différance'' indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of these opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function. }}


The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become ''The Structuralist Controversy''. The conference was also where he met [[Paul de Man]], who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst [[Jacques Lacan]], with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.
But structural difference will not be considered without him already destabilizing from the start its static, [[Synchronic analysis|synchronic]], [[Systematics – study of multi-term systems|taxonomic]], ahistoric motifs, remembering that all [[structure]] already refers to the [[Generative systems|generative]] movement in the play of differences:<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28–30:
{{quotation|It is also the becoming-space of the spoken chain — which has been called temporal or linear; a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other.<br>
The activity or productivity connoted by the ''a'' of ''différance'' refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust. Differences are the effects of transformations, and from this vantage the theme of ''différance'' is incompatible with the static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs in the concept of structure. }}</ref>
The other main component of ''différance'' is [[Deferral|deferring]], that takes into account the fact that meaning is not only a question of synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also of [[Synchronic analysis|diachrony]], with everything that was said and will be said, in History, difference as structure and deffering as genesis:<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 pp. 28–30">Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28–30</ref>
{{quotation|2) "the ''a'' of ''différance'' also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation — in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being — are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of ''différance'', which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance.}}
This confirms the subject as not present to itself and constituted on becoming space, in temporizing and also, as Saussure said, that "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject."<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Julia Kristeva" in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 28–30:
{{quotation|It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of differance, that the subject is not present, nor above all present to itself before differance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral; and it confirms that, as Saussure said, "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject."}}</ref>


===The Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate (1959)===
Questioned this myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective") Derrida will start a long deconstruction of all texts where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the actual construction of meaning and values based on the subordination of the movement of "differance":<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 pp. 28–30"/>
In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of [[Structuralism]], which was being widely favoured as the successor to the [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|Phenomenology]] approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of Structuralism to a "Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate."
{{quotation|At the point at which the concept of ''differance'', and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of ''differance'' in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to ''differance'', more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified."}}


Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since [[Plato]] in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.{{Citation needed|date=October 2010}} For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.{{Citation needed|date=October 2010}}
But, as Derrida also points out, these relations with other terms do not express only meaning but also values. The way elemental oppositions are put to work in all texts it is not only a theoretical operation but also a practical option.
The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc, would be to overturn these oppositions:<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 42–44</ref>
{{quotation|On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.


In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be ''already'' structured, in order to be the genesis ''of'' something?<ref>Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in ''Writing and Difference'' (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), ''Genèse et structure'' (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:
To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.}}


{{quotation|All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: "What does the notion of genesis ''in general'', on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structure ''in general'', on whose basis Husserl ''operates'' and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between genesis and structure ''in general''?" is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.}}</ref> In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.<ref>If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (also in ''Writing and Difference'', and see below), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):
It is not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. But this does not mean that they do not need to be analyzed and criticized in all its manifestations, showing the way these oppositions, both logical and axiological, are at work in all discourse for it to be able to produce meaning and values.<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42:
{{quotation|When I say that this phase is necessary, the word phase is perhaps not the most rigorous one. It is not a question of a chronological phase, a given moment, or a page that one day simply will be turned, in order to go on to other things. The necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Unlike those authors whose death does not await their demise, the time for overturning is never a dead letter.}}</ref>


{{quotation|Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.}}
And it is not enough to deconstruction to expose the way oppositions work and how meaning and values are produced in speech of all kinds and stop there in a nihilistic or cynic position regarding all meaning, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 42:
{{quotation|Therefore one might not proceed too quickly to a neutralization that in practice would leave the previous field untouched, leaving one no hold on the previous opposition, thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively. We know what always have been the practical (particularly political) effects of Immediately jumping beyond oppositions, and of protests in the simple form of neither this nor that.}}</ref>
To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new concepts, not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay:
{{quotation|That being said — and on the other hand — to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new concept that no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. If this interval, this biface or biphase, can be inscribed only in a bifurcated writing then it can only be marked in what I would call a grouped textual field: in the last analysis it is impossible to point it out, for a unilinear text, or a punctual position, an operation signed by a single author, are all by definition incapable of practicing this interval. }}
This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals:
{{quotation| Henceforth, in order better to mark this interval it has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text (for example, Mallarme), certain marks, shall we say (I mentioned certain ones just now, there are many others), that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which., however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics }}
Some examples of these new terms created by Derrida clearly exemplify the deconstruction procedure:<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 p. 43">Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43 {{quotation|Since this conflictuality of différance -which can be called contradiction only if one demarcates it by means of a long work on Hegel's concept of contradiction-can never be totally resoived, it marks its effects in what I call the text in general, in a text which is not reduced to a book or a library, and which can never be governed by a referent in the classical sense, that is, by a thing or by a transcendental signified that would regulate its movement. You can well see that it is not because I wish to appease or reconciliate that I prefer to employ the mark "differance" rather than refer to the system of difference-and-contradiction.}}</ref>


Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.</ref> At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original ''positing'', but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.<ref name="DerridaScarpetta71">Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp. 77–8:
{{quotation| (the pharmkon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;<br>
the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.;<br>
the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.;<br>
the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;<br>
spacing is neither space nor time;<br>
the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary.
}}


{{quotation|If the alterity of the other is ''posed'', that is, ''only'' posed, does it not amount to ''the same'', for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other ''inscribes'' in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is ''of itself confounded'' (''différance''): inscription, mark, text and not only ''thesis or theme''-inscription of the ''thesis''.}}
Nevertheless, perhaps Derrida's most famous mark was, from the start, ''differance'', created to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing and open the way to the rest of his approach:
{{quotation|and this holds first of all for a new concept of writing, that simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of a writing within speech, thereby disorganizing the entire inherited order and invading the entire field }}


On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. [[Bernard Stiegler]], "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) ''Jacques Derrida and the Humanities'' (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, ''[[Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus]]'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).</ref> It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".<ref>It is opposed to the concept of original purity, which destabilises the thought of both "genesis" and "structure", cf. [[Rodolphe Gasché]], ''The Tain of the Mirror'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:
===Illustration of ''différance''===
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of Content, that [[Louis Hjelmslev]] distinguished from Form of Expression) than how the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e. the relationship between [[Sign (linguistics)|signifier]] and signified) with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition: when can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying "walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying "orange", or exchange "past" for "present? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance. [[Deferral]] also comes into play, as the words that occur following "house" in any expression will revise the meaning of that word, sometimes dramatically so. This is true not only with [[syntagmatic]] succession in relation with [[paradigmatic]] simultaneity, but also, in a broader sense, between [[Historical linguistics|diachronic]] succession in History related with [[synchronic analysis|synchronic]] simultaneity inside a "system of distinct signs".


{{quotation|It is an opening that is structural, or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.}}
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and ''postponed'' in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods in time, and such a process would never end.


And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why ''différance'' is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of ''history'', which Derrida raises in ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'' (1962).</ref>
This is also true with all ontological oppositions and their many declensions, not only in philosophy as in human sciences in general, cultural studies, theory of Law, etc.: the intelligible and the sensible, the spontaneous and the receptive, autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, immanent and transcendent, as the interior and exterior, or the founded and the founder, normal and abnormal, phonetic and writing, analysis and synthesis, the literal sense and figurative meaning in language, reason and madness in psychoanalysis, the masculine and feminine in gender theory, man and animal in ecology, the beast and the sovereign in the political field, theory and practice as distinct dominions of thought itself. In all speeches in fact (and by right) we can make clear how they were dramatized, how the cleavages were made during the centuries, each author giving it different centers and establishing different hierarchies between the terms in the opposition


Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the [[aporia]]s and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.<ref>Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in [[John Sallis]] (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Philosophy'' (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:
===Derrida vs. Hegel – Distinguish deconstruction from speculative dialetics===
In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is not to collapse into Hegel's dialectic where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic whose ''telos'' would, necessarily, be to resolve it into a synthesis.<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43:
{{quotation| If there were a definition of ''differance'', it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian ''releve'' wherever it operates. What is at stake here is enormous. I emphasize the Hegelian ''Aufhebung'', such as it is interpreted by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it goes without saying that the double meaning of Aufhebung could be written otherwise. Whence its proximity to all the operations conducted against Hegel's dialectical speculation. }}</ref>


{{quotation|One of the more persistent misunderstandings that has thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect, and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [...] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to "account," in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the ''successful'' development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.}}</ref>
The presence of Hegelianism was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the existentialism from Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's:<ref>Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43.</ref>
{{quotation| Neither/nor: that is simultaneously either or; the mark is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.
<br>
In fact, I attempt to bring the critical operation to bear against the unceasing reappropriation of this work of the simulacrum by a dialectics of the Hegelian type (which even idealizes and "semantizes" the value of work), for Hegelian idealism consists precisely of a releve of the binary oppositions of classical idealism, a resolution of contradiction into a third term that comes in order to ''aufheben'', to deny while raising up, while idealizing, while sublimating into an anamnesic interiority (Errinnerung), while interning difference in a self-presence. }}


===1967–1972===
This difference from Hegel should be understood as essential from the start, and the Differance being one of the first terms that he tried more accurately to distinguish from all forms of Hegelian difference when proceeding with deconstruction:<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 p. 44">Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta," in “Positions” (The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 44.</ref>
Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: ''Speech and Phenomena'', ''[[Of Grammatology]]'' and ''Writing and Difference''.<ref name="67RonseP4">Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp. 4–5 quote: "[''Speech and Phenomena''] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works. ''Of Grammatology'' refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture, ''Speech...'' would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology."</ref>
{{quotation| Since it is still a question of elucidating the relationship to Hegel — a difficult labor, which for the most part remains before us, and which in a certain way is (interminable, at least if one wishes to execute it rigorously and minutely — I have attempted to distinguish ''differance'' (whose ''a'' marks, among other things, its productive and conflictual characteristics) from Hegelian difference, and have done so precisely at the point at which Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it, to interiorize it, to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto- theological or onto-teleological synthesis. }}


On several occasions Derrida has acknowledged his debt to [[Edmund Husserl|Husserl]] and [[Martin Heidegger|Heidegger]], and stated that without them he would have not said a single word.<ref name="67RonseP8">Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8</ref><ref name="LetterJap">On the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (''Derrida and [[différance]]'', eds. [[Robert Bernasconi]] and [[David Wood (philosopher)|David Wood]]) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms ''Destruktion'' and ''Abbau'', via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy.</ref> Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?"<ref name="67RonseP4">Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 4</ref> In another essay in ''Writing and Difference'' entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same<ref>Derrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,''Writing and Difference''. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97–192.</ref> "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something ''tout autre'', "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."<ref name="Caputo97P42">Caputo (1997), p. 42</ref> Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and [[Emmanuel Lévinas|Lévinas]], these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]],<ref>''Linguistics and Grammatology'' in ''Of Grammatology'', pp. 27–73</ref> [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]],<ref name="FromRestricted">''From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve'' in ''Writing and Difference''</ref> [[Michel Foucault|Foucault]],<ref name="Cogitothe">''Cogito and the History of Madness'' in ''Writing and Difference''</ref> [[Georges Bataille|Bataille]],<ref name="FromRestricted" /> [[René Descartes|Descartes]],<ref name="Cogitothe" /> anthropologist [[Claude Lévi-Strauss|Lévi-Strauss]],<ref>''The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau'' in ''Of Grammatology'', pp. 101–140</ref><ref>''Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'' in ''Writing and Difference''</ref> paleontologist [[André Leroi-Gourhan|Leroi-Gourhan]],<ref>''Of Grammatology'', pp. 83-86.</ref> psychoanalyst [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]],<ref>''Freud and the Scene of Writing'' in ''Writing and Difference''</ref> and writers such as [[Edmond Jabès|Jabès]]<ref>"Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book" and "Ellipsis" in ''Writing and Difference'', pp. 64-78 and 295-300.</ref> and [[Antonin Artaud|Artaud]].<ref>''La Parole soufflée'' and ''The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation'' in ''Writing and Difference''</ref>
More than difference is the conflictuality of difference that must be distinguished from contradiction in Hegel to clearly distinguish deconstruction from speculative dialetics:<ref name="Jacques Derrida 1981 p. 44"/>
{{quotation| Differance (at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel, everything, what is most decisive, is played out, here, in what Husserl called "subtle nuances," or Marx "micrology") must sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the ''Aufhebung'' and with speculative dialectics. Since this conflictuality of ''differance'' — which can be called contradiction only if one demarcates it by means of a long work on Hegel's concept of contradiction — can never be totally resolved, it marks its effects in what I call the text in general, in a text which is not reduced to a book or a library, and which can never be governed by a referent in the classical sense, that is, by a thing or by a transcendental signified that would regulate its movement. You can well see that it is not because I wish to appease or reconciliate(sic) that I prefer to employ the mark "differance" rather than refer to the system of difference- and-contradiction. }}


This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the [[Western intellectual tradition]], characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as [[logocentrism]], and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is ''essentially'' logocentric,<ref name="Lamont87">Lamont '87, pp. 590, 602–606 (Lamont, Michele ''[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2780292?uid=3738128&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102445458411 How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida]''. [[American Journal of Sociology]], Vol. 93, No. 3 [Nov., 1987])</ref> and that this is a [[paradigm]] inherited from Judaism and [[Hellenistic philosophy|Hellenism]].<ref name="Borody98"/> He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, [[patriarchal]] and [[masculine|masculinist]].<ref name="Borody98"/><ref>[[Hélène Cixous]], [[Catherine Clément]] [1975] ''La jeune née''</ref> Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in [[Western culture]]",<ref name="Borody98">[http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/wayneb/ Wayne A. Borody] (1998) pp. 3, 5 ''[http://kenstange.com/nebula/feat013/feat013.html Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition]'' [http://kenstange.com/nebula/ Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science], Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27).</ref> arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as [[sacred/profane]], [[sign (semiotics)|signifier/signified]], [[Mind–body problem|mind/body]]), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings."<ref name="Lamont87"/> Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as [[deconstruction]] of Western culture.{{Citation needed|date=August 2010}}
==='There is nothing outside the text'===
There is one statement by Derrida which he regarded as the axial statement of his whole essay on [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]] (part of the highly influential ''[[Of Grammatology]]'', 1967),<ref name="Derrida67p158"/> and which is perhaps his most quoted and famous statement ever.<ref name="Royle04p62"/> It is the assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" (''il n'y a pas de hors-texte''),<ref name="Derrida67p158">Derrida (1967) ''Of Grammatology'', Part II "Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title: "The Exorbitant. Question of Method:, pp. 158–59, 163:</ref> which means that “there is no such a thing as out-of-the-text”, in other words, the context is an integral part of the text.<ref name="Afterword88P136">Derrida (1988), ''Afterword'', p. 136.</ref>
<br>
{{quotation|We can call "context" the entire "real-history-of-the-world," if you like, in which this value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have taken on meaning and imposed themselves. That does not in the slightest discredit them. In the name of what, of which other "truth," moreover, would it?
<br>
One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization.
<br>
The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ("there is nothing outside the text" [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.}}
Critics of Derrida have countless times quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction.<ref name="Afterword88P136"/><ref name="Coward90"/><ref name="Pidgen90">Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) ''On a defence of derrida'', in [http://books.google.com/books?id=M71ZAAAAMAAJ ''The Critical review''] (1990) Issues 30–32, pp. 40–41.</ref><ref name=wpost04Sullivan>Sullivan, Patricia (2004) [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21050-2004Oct9.html ''Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher''], in ''[[Washington Post]]'', October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007.</ref> Some commentators have said that it means that it is not possible to think outside of the philosophical system,<ref name="Reilly05">Reilly, Brian J. (2005) ''Jacques Derrida'', in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.</ref> or that there is no experience of reality outside of language.<ref name="Coward90">Coward, Harold G. (1990) [http://books.google.com/books?id=JtyqhtCW7jQC ''Derrida and Indian philosophy''], pp. 83, 137.</ref>
With regards to the broadness of the concept of "text", he added:<ref name="Royle04p62"/><ref name="Ferraris97p76">Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76</ref>
{{quotation|I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.}}


In 1968, he published his influential essay "[[Plato's Pharmacy]]" in the French journal ''[[Tel Quel]]'' .<ref name="Spurgin97">Spurgin, Tim (1997) [http://www.lawrence.edu/dept/english/courses/60a/handouts/pharmacy.html Reader's Guide to Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"]</ref><ref name="Graff93">Graff (1993)</ref> This essay was later collected in ''[[Dissemination (Derrida)|Dissemination]]'', one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection ''Margins of Philosophy'' and the collection of interviews entitled ''[[Positions]]''.
===Deconstructing "normality" in analytical philosophy===
{{Main|Limited Inc}}
A sequence of encounters with [[analytical philosophy]] is collected in ''[[Limited Inc]]'' (1988), having Austin and Searle as the main interlocutors. Derrida would argue there about the problem he found in the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition from which Austin and Searle were only paradigmatic examples. His deconstruction there of the structure called "normal" is in many ways paradigmatic of his approach:<ref>Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in ''Limited, Inc.'' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133:
{{quotation| One theoretical consequence or implication that I wanted first of all to recall to Searle, and its effects on his entire discourse are, I believe, non delimitable. In the description of the structure called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal", this possibility of transgression must be integrated as an essential possibility.
<br>
The possibility of transgression cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensably about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general. }}
</ref>
{{quotation| In the description of the structure called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal,"this possibility of transgression must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility of transgression cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensably about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general.}}
He continued arguing how problematic it was establishing the relation between "normal", "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction", defined as its "parasite", “for part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing to "de-essentialize" itself as it were”:<ref>Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in ''Limited, Inc.'' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133:
{{quotation|I will not repeat my objection to the order of "logical dependency" invoked by Searle concerning the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its "parasite." But I recall this example here apropos of your question. One cannot subordinate or leave in abeyance the analysis of fiction in order to proceed firstly and " logically" to that of "nonfiction or standard discourse. " For part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing to "de-essentialize" itself as it were. }}
</ref>
He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:<ref>Jacques Derrida, Afterwords" in ''Limited, Inc.'' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133.</ref>
{{quotation|what is "nonfiction standard discourse," what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive "parasitism," is always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)?
<br> This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its fictional "parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional.}}


===1973–1980===
This dispute is well configured by [[Umberto Eco]] when, exposing the example of divergences about the concept of "Denotation" in Staurt Mill and Hjelmslev, concluded:<ref>Umberto Eco, "Signos" in ''Enciclopédia Einaudi'', [[Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda]], p. 108.</ref>
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as ''[[Glas (book)|Glas]]'' (1974) and ''[[The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]]'' (1980).
{{quotation|the reason for the confusions is not accidental, nor Esperanto full of goodwill will be able to solve it. It is that the semiotic thought presents itself, from the beginning, as always divided by a dilemma and marked by a choice, more or less implicit, that guides the thinker: is it his task when studying languages to know when and how to refer to things properly (problem of truth) or to ask how and when they are used to produce beliefs? Or, downstream of any terminological choice, there is a deeper choice between transparent systems of signification about things or systems of signification as producers of reality. Pathetic confidentiality of this division, the two sides of the fence, when the division is manifested, rate the opponent as idealist (at least in more recent times).}}


Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the [[American 1980s culture wars|American culture wars]], [[conservatives]] started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,<ref name="NationObituaries"/> and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.<ref name="Lamont87"/><ref name="Hansson">Sven Ove Hansson ''[http://web.archive.org/web/20060718054747/http://www.infra.kth.se/phil/theoria/editorial721.htm Philosophical Schools]'' – Editorial From Theoria'' vol. 72, Part 1 (2006).</ref>{{Request quotation|date=August 2010}}
===The difficulty of definition and Derrida's "negative" descriptions===
When asked "What is deconstruction?" Derrida replied, "I have no simple and formalisable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question".<ref>Derrida, 1985, p.&nbsp;4</ref> Derrida believes that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.


===''Of Spirit'' (1987)===
Derrida's defenders{{citation needed|date=March 2011}} argue that in giving this reply, Derrida was simply being consistent: the word "deconstruction" is as slippery as any other word in the dictionary. Others criticize Derrida for being unable to define the discipline that he himself created, and for being evasive about it.
On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as ''Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question''. It follows the shifting role of ''Geist'' (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.<ref>Derrida (1989) ''Of Spirit'', pp.vii-1</ref> With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?"<ref>Derrida (1989) ''Of Spirit'', p.1</ref> His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in ''Margins of Philosophy'', his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as ''Geschlecht'' and ''Geschlecht II'').<ref>Derrida (1989) ''Of Spirit'', p.7, 11, 117-118</ref> He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this ''Geflecht'' [braid]": "the question of the question," "the essence of technology," "the discourse of animality," and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order."<ref>Derrida (1989) ''Of Spirit'', pp.8-12</ref>


''Of Spirit'' is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, [[Victor Farias|Victor Farías]], who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the [[Nazism|Nazi]] ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.<ref>Powell 2006, [http://books.google.com/books?id=sbhlgspwVwMC&pg=PA167 167].</ref>
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative ([[wikt:apophatic|apophatic]]) than positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by [[Toshihiko Izutsu]] some preliminary considerations on how to translate "deconstruction" in Japanese, in order to at least prevent going contrary to its actual meaning, Derrida therefore began his response by saying that such question amounts to "what deconstruction is not, or rather ''ought'' not to be."<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP1">Derrida [1983], p. 1</ref>


===1990s: political and ethical themes===
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3">Derrida [1983], p. 3</ref> in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts."<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure."<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> Derrida's necessity of returning to a term [[sous rature|under erasure]] means that even though these terms are problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. Derrida's thought developed in relation to [[Husserl|Husserl's]] and this return to something under erasure has a similarity to Husserl's [[Bracketing (phenomenology)|phenomenological reduction]] or [[epoché]].{{or|date=May 2013}} Derrida acknowledges that his preference for negative description “has been called...a type of [[negative theology]].”<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and that this would be a mistake because it would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. This means that if Derrida were to positively define deconstruction as, for example, a critique then this would put the concept of critique for ever outside the possibility of deconstruction. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to surpass the notion of critique.
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include ''Force of Law'' (1990), as well as ''[[Specters of Marx]]'' (1994) and ''Politics of Friendship'' (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.


Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as ''The Gift of Death'' as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on [[Abraham]] and the [[Binding of Isaac|Sacrifice of Isaac]],<ref>Jack Reynolds, Jonathan Roffe (2004) ''[http://books.google.it/books?id=D7jq50nVzGAC Understanding Derrida]'' p. 49</ref><ref>''Gift of Death'', pp. 57–72</ref> and from [[Søren Kierkegaard|Søren Kierkegaard's]] ''[[Fear and Trembling]]''. Derrida's contemporary readings of [[Emmanuel Levinas]], [[Walter Benjamin]], [[Carl Schmitt]], [[Jan Patočka]], on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, [[film theory]], [[anthropology]], [[sociology]], [[historiography]], law, [[psychoanalysis]], [[theology]], [[feminism]], gay and lesbian studies and political theory. [[Jean-Luc Nancy]], [[Richard Rorty]], [[Geoffrey Hartman]], [[Harold Bloom]], [[Rosalind Krauss]], [[Hélène Cixous]], [[Julia Kristeva]], [[Duncan Kennedy (legal philosopher)|Duncan Kennedy]], [[Gary Peller]], [[Drucilla Cornell]], [[Alan Hunt (professor)|Alan Hunt]], [[Hayden White]], and [[Alun Munslow]] are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.
====Not a method====
Derrida states that “Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one.”<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3">Derrida [1983], p. 3</ref> This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation when he states that “It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological “metaphor” that seems necessarily attached to the very word “deconstruction” has been able to seduce or lead astray.”<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that <blockquote>


Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as ''Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas'', an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida utilized [[Bracha L. Ettinger]]'s interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.<ref>B. L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas,"Que dirait Eurydice?"/ "What would Eurydice Say?" (1991-93). Reprinted to coincide with Kabinet exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. This is a reprint of Le féminin est cette différence inouïe (Livre d'artiste, 1994, and it includes the text of Time is the Breath of the Spirit, MOMA, Oxford, 1993.) Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.</ref>
Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided ''how'' to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.<ref>Beardsworth, R. 1996. ''Derrida and the Political''. London and New York: Routledge, p. 4.</ref>


Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on [[Maurice Blanchot]], [[Paul Celan]], and others.
</blockquote>


In 1991 he published ''[[The Other Heading]]'', in which he discussed the concept of [[Identity (social science)|identity]] (as in [[cultural identity]], [[European identity]], and [[national identity]]), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."<ref>''The Other Heading'', pp. 5–6</ref>
Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading because it ignores the empirical facticity of the text itself — that is it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find. To be responsible a deconstruction must carefully negotiate the empirical facticity of the text and hence respond to it. Deconstruction is not a method and this means that it is not a neat set of rules that can be applied to any text in the same way. Deconstruction is therefore not neatly transcendental because it cannot be considered separate from the contingent empirical facticity of the particular texts that any deconstruction must carefully negotiate. Each deconstruction is necessarily different (otherwise it achieves no work) and this is why Derrida states that “Deconstruction takes place, it is an event.”<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP4">Derrida [1983], p. 4</ref> On the other hand, deconstruction cannot be completely untranscendental because this would make it meaningless to, for example, speak of two different examples of deconstruction as both being examples of deconstruction. It is for this reason that [[Richard Rorty]] asks if Derrida should be considered a quasi-transcendental philosopher that operates in the tension between the demands of the [[empirical]] and the [[Transcendence (religion)|transcendental]]. Each example of deconstruction must be different, but it must also share something with other examples of deconstruction. Deconstruction is therefore not a method in the traditional sense but is what Derrida terms "an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing."<ref name="Derrida80p.40" />


===The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)===
====Not a critique====
Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. ''Memoires for Paul de Man'', a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into ''[[The Work of Mourning]]'' (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition ''Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde'' (literally, ''The end of the world, unique each time'') to include essays dedicated to [[Gérard Granel]] and Maurice Blanchot.
Derrida states that deconstruction is not a [[critique]] in the Kantian sense.<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> This is because [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] defines the term critique as the opposite of [[dogmatism]]. For Derrida it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language we use in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. For Derrida language is dogmatic because it is inescapably [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]]. Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of [[Sign (linguistics)|signifiers]] that only refer to that which transcends them — the signified. This transcending of the empirical facticity of the signifier by an ideally conceived signified is metaphysical. It is metaphysical in the sense that it mimics the understanding in [[Aristotle]]'s metaphysics of an ideally conceived being as that which transcends the existence of every individually existing thing. In a less formal version of the argument it might be noted that it is impossible to use language without asserting being, and hence metaphysics, constantly through the use of the various modifications of the verb "to be". In addition Derrida asks rhetorically "Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?"<ref>Derrida, J., 1973. ''Speech and Phenomena''. Trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, p. 5.</ref> By this Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something ''is'' the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence desediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.


====Not an analysis====
===2002===
In the October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film ''[[Derrida (film)|Derrida]]'', he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to [[Guy Debord]]'s work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle."<ref name="Derrida02Q&A">Derrida (2002) Q&A session at Film Forum</ref> Among the places in which Derrida mentions the ''[[Spectacle (critical theory)|Spectacle]]'', a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.<ref name="Derrida97Intellectuelsp39">{{Cite journal|last = Derrida|origyear = 1997|title = Les Intellectuels|year = 2005|pages = 39–40|language = French|postscript = <!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}</ref>
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an [[analysis]] in the traditional sense.<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> This is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text. This is because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see the page on [[différance]].


==Politics==
====Not post-structuralist====
{{Refimprove section|date=December 2008}}
Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which "[[structuralism]] was dominant"<ref name = "xbkhat">Derrida [1983], p. 2</ref> and its use is related to this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an "antistructuralist gesture"<ref name = "xbkhat" /> because "Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented."<ref name = "xbkhat" /> At the same time for Derrida deconstruction is also a "structuralist gesture"<ref name = "xbkhat" /> because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So for Derrida deconstruction involves “a certain attention to structures"<ref name = "xbkhat" /> and tries to “understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted."<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the "structural problematic."<ref name = "xbkhat" /> The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is "in the essential mode of creation or movement,"<ref>Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from ''Writing and Difference'' trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 194.</ref> and structure, "systems, or complexes, or static configurations."<ref name = "mcoctr">Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from ''Writing and Difference'' trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 194.</ref> An example of genesis would be the [[sense|sensory]] [[idea]]s from which knowledge is then derived in the [[empirical]] [[epistemology]]. An example of structure would be a [[binary opposition]] such as [[good and evil]] where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element.
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:
* Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the [[May 1968 protests]], and organized the first general assembly at the ''École Normale Superieure'', he said "I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally "freed" speech, of restored "transparence," and so forth."<ref name="Derrida91MagLitEwald">Derrida (1991) ''"A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking"'', pp. 347–9.</ref> During [[May '68]], he met frequently with [[Maurice Blanchot]].<ref>Bennington (1991), p. 332</ref>
* He registered his objections to the [[Vietnam War]] in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.
* In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the [[French petition against age of consent laws|petition against age of consent laws]].
* In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of [[Roger Scruton]] and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian [[Jean-Pierre Vernant]]. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.<ref name="Powell06p151">Powell (2006), p. 151</ref>
* In late 1981 he was arrested by the [[Czechoslovakia]]n government upon leading a conference in [[Prague]] that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled", as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the [[François Mitterrand|Mitterrand]] government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on January 1, 1982.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," ''Resistances of Psychoanalysis'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 70–1.</ref>
* He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear war in 1984.<ref>Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)". Diacritics, 1984</ref>
* He was active in cultural activities against the [[History of South Africa in the apartheid era|Apartheid government of South Africa]] and on behalf of [[Nelson Mandela]] beginning in 1983.
* He met with [[Palestinian people|Palestinian]] intellectuals during a 1988 visit to [[Jerusalem]]. He was active in the collective "89 for equality", which campaigned for the [[right of foreigners to vote]] in local elections.
* He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-[[utilitarianism|utilitarian]] argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free [[Mumia Abu-Jamal]].
* Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral [[political party]] until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of [[Lionel Jospin]]'s [[French Socialist Party|Socialist]] candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to [[French Communist Party|Communist]] organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.{{Citation needed|date=December 2010}}
* In the [[French presidential election, 2002|2002 French presidential election]] he refused to vote in the run-off between far right leader [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] and [[Jacques Chirac]], citing a lack of acceptable choices.{{Citation needed|date= December 2010}}
* While supportive of the American government in the wake of [[September 11, 2001 attacks|the terrorist attacks of 9/11]], he opposed the [[2003 invasion of Iraq]] (see ''Rogues'' and his contribution to ''Philosophy in a Time of Terror'' with [[Giovanna Borradori]] and [[Jürgen Habermas]]).


Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, [[reason of state]], the other, decision, [[sovereignty]], Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.
For Derrida, Genesis and Structure are both inescapable modes of description, there are some things that "must be described in terms of structure, and others which must be described in terms of genesis,"<ref name = "mcoctr" /> but these two modes of description are difficult to reconcile and this is the tension of the structural problematic. In Derrida's own words the structural problematic is that "beneath the serene use of these concepts [genesis and structure] is to be found a debate that...makes new reductions and explications indefinitely necessary."<ref>Derrida, J., 1978. "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" from ''Writing and Difference'' trans. Alan Bass. London & New York: Routledge, p. 196.</ref> The structural problematic is therefore what propels philosophy and hence deconstruction forward. Another significance of the structural problematic for Derrida is that while a critique of structuralism is a recurring theme of his philosophy this does not mean that philosophy can claim to be able to discard all structural aspects.


==Influences on Derrida==
It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from [[post-structuralism]], a term that would suggest philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that “the motif of deconstruction has been associated with "post-structuralism"" but that this term was "a word unknown in France until its “return” from the United States."<ref name="LetterToIzutsuP3"/> Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl Derrida actually argues ''for'' the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality and [[Manfred Frank]] has even referred to Derrida's work as "Neostructuralism."<ref>Frank, M., 1989. What is Neostructuralism? Trans. S. Wilke & R. Gray. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.</ref>
Crucial readings in his adolescence were [[Rousseau]]'s ''[[Reveries of a Solitary Walker]]'' and ''[[Confessions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)|Confessions]]'', [[André Gide]]'s journal, ''[[La porte étroite]]'', ''[[Les nourritures terrestres]]'' and ''[[The Immoralist]]'';<ref name="TeenBooks"/> and the works of [[Friedrich Nietzsche]].<ref name="TeenBooks">Derrida (1989) ''This Strange Institution Called Literature'', pp. 35, 38–9</ref> The phrase ''Families, I hate you!'' in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's ''Les nourritures terrestres'', book IV.<ref>Gide's ''Les nourritures terrestres'', book IV, quote: «Familles, je vous hais! Foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.»</ref> In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest" (''Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos'').<ref>1991 Interview with [[Francois Ewald]] ''Wahn muß übers Denken wachen'' published in: Werner Kolk (Translator). Literataz. 1992, p. 1-2. (German), as quoted in http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3891m6db#page-1</ref>


Other influences upon Derrida are [[Martin Heidegger]],<ref name="67RonseP8"/><ref name="LetterJap"/> [[Plato]], [[Søren Kierkegaard]], [[Alexandre Kojève]], [[Maurice Blanchot]], [[Antonin Artaud]], [[Roland Barthes]], [[Georges Bataille]], [[Edmund Husserl]], [[Emmanuel Lévinas]], [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Karl Marx]], [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], [[James Joyce]], [[Samuel Beckett]], [[J. L. Austin]]<ref name="Afterword88P130">Derrida (1988) ''Afterword'', pp. 130–1</ref> and [[Stéphane Mallarmé]].{{Citation needed|date=August 2010}}
===Alternative definitions===
The popularity of the term deconstruction combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a direct summary of Derrida's actual position.


His book, ''Adieu à Emanuel Levinas'', reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.{{Citation needed|date=August 2013}}
* [[Paul de Man]] was a member of the [[Yale School]] and a prominent practitioner of deconstruction as he understood it. His definition of deconstruction is that, "[i]t's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements."<ref>De Man, in Moynihan 1986, p. 156.</ref>


==Derrida and his peers and contemporaries==
* [[Richard Rorty]] was a prominent interpreter of Derrida's philosophy. His definition of deconstruction is that, "the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message."<ref>Rorty 1995{{page needed|date=November 2013}}</ref> (The word ''accidental'' is used here in the sense of ''incidental''.)
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included [[Paul de Man]], [[Jean-François Lyotard]], [[Michel Foucault]], [[Louis Althusser]], [[Emmanuel Levinas]], [[Maurice Blanchot]], [[Gilles Deleuze]], [[Jean-Luc Nancy]], [[Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]], [[Sarah Kofman]], [[Hélène Cixous]], [[Bernard Stiegler]], [[Alexander García Düttmann]], Joseph Cohen, [[Geoffrey Bennington]], [[Jean-Luc Marion]], [[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]], [[Raphael Zagury-Orly]], [[Jacques Ehrmann]], [[Avital Ronell]], [[Judith Butler]], [[Samuel Weber]] and [[Catherine Malabou]].


===Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe===
* [[John D. Caputo]] attempts to explain deconstruction in a nutshell by stating: <blockquote>"Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell—a secure axiom or a pithy maxim—the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. ''That'' is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might even say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction ''is''. In a nutshell. ...Have we not run up against a paradox and an [[aporia]] [something contradictory]...the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is just what impels deconstruction, what rouses it out of bed in the morning..." (Caputo 1997, p.32)</blockquote>
[[Jean-Luc Nancy]] and [[Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe]] were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.


Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: ''Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy'' (''On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy'', 2005).
* [[Niall Lucy]] points to the impossibility of defining the term at all, stating: <blockquote>"While in a sense it ''is'' impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction’s part than with the impossibility of every ‘is’ as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every ‘is’, or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as a position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of ‘preference’".<ref>Niall Lucy, ''A Derrida Dictionary'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).</ref></blockquote>


===Paul de Man===
* David B. Allison is an early translator of Derrida and states in the introduction to his translation of ''Speech and Phenomena'': <blockquote>[Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics.<ref>Introduction by Allison, in Derrida, 1973, p. xxxii, n. 1.</ref></blockquote>
{{Main|Paul de Man}}


Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at [[Johns Hopkins University]] and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.
* [[Paul Ricœur]] defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.<ref>Klein 1995{{page needed|date=November 2013}}</ref>


Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book ''Memoires: pour Paul de Man'' and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal ''[[Critical Inquiry]]'' called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic [[Ortwin de Graef]] that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the [[History of Belgium#World War II|German occupation of Belgium]], including several that were explicitly [[antisemitic]].
* Richard Ellmann defines 'deconstruction' as the systematic undoing of understanding.


Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple [[Jean Beaufret]] over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, [[Maurice Blanchot]]) interpreted as antisemitic.
A survey of the secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy that Derrida is working in relation to. These secondary works (e.g. ''Deconstruction for Beginners''<ref name="powell/lee">Powell, James and Lee, Joe, ''Deconstruction for Beginners'' (Writers & Readers Publishing, 2005)</ref> and ''Deconstructions: A User's Guide''<ref name="royle">Royle, Nicholas, ''Deconstructions: A User's Guide'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)</ref>) have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized as too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.{{Citation needed|date=April 2007}} In an effort to clarify the rather muddled reception of the term deconstruction Derrida specifies what deconstruction ''is not'' through a number of negative definitions.


===Michel Foucault===
==Related works by Derrida==
Derrida's criticism of [[Michel Foucault|Foucault]] appears in the essay ''Cogito and the History of Madness'' (from ''Writing and Difference''). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at [[Jean Wahl|Wahl]]'s ''[[Collège philosophique]]'', which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.<ref name="Powell06p34-5">Powell (2006) pp. 34–5</ref>


In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his ''History of Madness'', Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text."<ref>Foucault, Michel, ''History of Madness'', ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xxiv,573.</ref> According to historian [[Carlo Ginzburg]], Foucault may have written ''[[The Order of Things]]'' (1966) and ''[[The Archaeology of Knowledge]]'' partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.<ref name="GinzburgNihilism">Carlo Ginzburg [1976], ''Il formaggio e i vermi'', translated in 1980 as ''[http://books.google.es/books?id=4IUREWq_o3MC The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller]'', trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii. ISBN 978-0-8018-4387-7</ref> Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in ''Cogito and the History of Madness'', as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.<ref name="GinzburgNihilism"/>
===Antecedent example: the Phenomenology vs. Structuralism debate===
Before coining the term Deconstruction, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly at a time when the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly be called [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|"phenomenological"]] and [[structuralism|"structural"]] approaches to understanding individual and collective life. For those with a more phenomenological bent the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a problematic and misleading avenue of interrogation, and the "depth" and originality of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential. It is in this context that in 1959 Derrida asks the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be ''already'' structured in order to be the genesis ''of'' something?<ref>Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in ''Writing and Difference'' (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), ''Genèse et structure'' (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:


===Derrida's translators===
{{quotation|All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: "What does the notion of genesis ''in general'', on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structure ''in general'', on whose basis Husserl ''operates'' and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between genesis and structure ''in general''?" is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.}}</ref>
{{Refimprove section|date=May 2013}}
[[Geoffrey Bennington]], [[Avital Ronell]] and [[Samuel Weber]] belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of these are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.


Having started as a student of de Man, [[Gayatri Spivak]] took on the translation of ''Of Grammatology'' early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and [[Peggy Kamuf]] have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.<ref>If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "[[Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]]" (also in ''Writing and Difference''), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):


Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and [[David Wills (writer)|David Wills]] are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://derridaseminars.org/team.html |title=Derrida Seminar Translation Project |publisher=Derridaseminars.org |date= |accessdate=21 October 2012}}</ref> Volumes I and II of ''The Beast and the Sovereign'' (presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002 and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as ''The Death Penalty, Volume I'' (covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include ''Heidegger: The Question of Being and History'' (1964-1965), ''Death Penalty, Volume II'' (2000–2001), ''Perjury and Pardon, Volume I'' (1997–1998), and ''Perjury and Pardon, Volume II'' (1998–1999).<ref>{{cite web|url=http://derridaseminars.org/volumes.html |title=Derrida Seminar Translation Project |publisher=Derridaseminars.org |date= |accessdate=1 January 2014}}</ref>
{{quotation|Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.}}


With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as ''Jacques Derrida'', an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/Derrida/applied.html |title=Lovely Luton |publisher=Hydra.humanities.uci.edu |date= |accessdate=21 October 2012}}</ref>
Between the two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.{{or|date=May 2013}}</ref> At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "[[Historical linguistics|diachronic]]" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original ''positing'', but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.<ref>Cf. Derrida, ''Positions'' (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 95–6:


===Marshall McLuhan===
{{quotation|If the alterity of the other is ''posed'', that is, ''only'' posed, does it not amount to ''the same'', for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other ''inscribes'' in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is ''of itself confounded'' (''différance''): inscription, mark, text and not only ''thesis or theme''-inscription of the ''thesis''.}}
Derrida was familiar with the work of [[Marshall McLuhan]], and since his early 1967 writings (''Of Grammatology'', ''Speech and Phenomena''), he speaks of language as a "medium,"<ref>''Speech and Phenomena'', Introduction</ref> of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."<ref>''Of Grammatology'', Part I.1</ref>


He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.<ref name="Poster2010">Poster (2010), pp. 3–4, 12–13</ref> In a 1982 interview, he said: <blockquote>"I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too."<ref name="Brennan82">Derrida [1982] [http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-derrida/articles/excuse-me-but-i-never-said-exactly-so/ ''Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview''], with Paul Brennan, ''On the Beach'' (Glebe NSW, Australia). No.1/1983: p. 42</ref></blockquote>
On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. [[Bernard Stiegler]], "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) ''Jacques Derrida and the Humanities'' (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, ''[[Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus]]'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).</ref> It is this thought of originary complexity, rather than original purity, which destabilises the thought of both genesis and structure, that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which derive all of its terms, including deconstruction.<ref>On this destabilisation of both "genesis" and "structure," cf. [[Rodolphe Gasché]], ''The Tain of the Mirror'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:


And in his 1972 essay ''Signature Event Context'' he said: <blockquote>"As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and "communication of consciousnesses." We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called ''logocentrism''."<ref>Derrida 1972 ''Signature Event Context''</ref></blockquote>
{{quotation|It is an opening that is structural, or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.}}


==Criticism==
And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why ''différance'' is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of ''history'', which Derrida raises in ''Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction'' (1962).</ref>


===Différance===
===Obscurantism===
In an interview with ''reason.com'' [[John R. Searle]] was asked, "You've debated Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Are they making bad arguments, or are they just being misread?", Searle responded "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure."<ref>{{cite web | last = Searle | first = John R. | others = Interviewed by Steven R. Postrel and Edward Feser | title = Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle | website = Reason.com | publisher = Reason Foundation | url = http://reason.com/archives/2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie | month = February | year = 2000 | accessdate = 21 August 2013 | archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20091216100717/http://reason.com/archives/2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie | archivedate = 16 April 2009}}</ref>
{{main|Différance}}
In a paper entitled ''Ghostwriting''<ref name="Spivak 1995">{{cite journal | last1 = Spivak | first1 = Gayatri Chakravorty | title = Ghostwriting | journal = Diacritics | volume = 25 | issue = 2 | pages = 64–84 | year = 1995 | publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press | url = http://www.jstor.org/stable/465145 }}</ref> [[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]]—the translator of Derrida's ''De la grammatologie'' (''Of Grammatology'') into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx.<ref>|Jacques Derrida|Marx & Sons|{{cite book | editor1-last = Sprinker| editor1-first = Michael| others = chapter by Jacques Derrida| title = Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"| year = 2008| publisher = Verso
Crucial to Derrida's work is the concept of [[différance]], a complex term which refers to the process of the production of difference and deferral. According to Derrida, all difference and all presence arise from the operation of différance.<ref name="PositionsP5-6">Derrida, J., 2002. ''Positions''. Translated by A. Bass. 2nd ed. introduction by C. Norris. London & New York: Continuum, pp. 5–6.</ref> Différance is an infinitesimal difference that is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but also it is a difference that is "undecidable"<ref>Leonard Lawlor, [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#Semiotics "Jacques Derrida"], Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003, 2005.</ref> (see ''[[Indeterminacy (philosophy)|Indeterminacy]]'').
| location = London| isbn = 9781844672110| chapter = Chapter 10: Marx & Sons| page = 223| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Ghostly_Demarcations.html?id=g7zGmaggvesC}}</ref>
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style [[Noam Chomsky]] wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood".<ref>{{cite web | last = Noam | first = Chomsky | title = Postmodernism? | website = ZCommunications | url = http://www.zcommunications.org/postmodernism-by-noam-chomsky.html | month = November | year = 1995 | accessdate = 21 August 2013 }}</ref>
Commenting on Derrida's ''Specters of Marx'', [[Terry Eagleton]] wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody."<ref>{{cite book
| editor1-last = Sprinker| editor1-first = Michael| others = chapter by Terry Eagleton| title = Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"| year = 2008| publisher = Verso
| location = London| isbn = 9781844672110| chapter = Chapter 5: Marxism without Marx| pages = 83–7| url = http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Ghostly_Demarcations.html?id=g7zGmaggvesC}}</ref>


===Criticism from analytic philosophers===
To deconstruct philosophy is to think carefully within philosophy about philosophical concepts in terms of their structure and genesis. Deconstruction questions the appeal to presence by arguing that there is always an irreducible aspect of non-presence in operation. Derrida terms this aspect of non-presence différance. Différance is therefore the key theoretical basis of deconstruction. Deconstruction questions the basic operation of all philosophy through the appeal to presence and différance. Derrida argues that différance pervades all philosophy because "What defers presence [...] is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign, its trace".<ref name="Derrida, J. 2002, p. 7">Derrida, J., 2002. ''Positions''. Translated by A. Bass. 2nd ed. introduction by C. Norris. London & New York: Continuum, p. 7.</ref> Différance therefore pervades all philosophy because all philosophy is constructed as a system through language. Différance is essential to language because it ''produces'' "what metaphysics calls the sign (signified/signifier)".<ref>Derrida, J., 2002. ''Positions''. Translated by A. Bass. 2nd ed. introduction by C. Norris. London & New York: Continuum, p. 6.</ref>
Though Derrida addressed the [[American Philosophical Association]] at least on one occasion in 1988,<ref>{{Cite journal|first = Newton|last = Garver|year = 1991|url = http://www.springerlink.com/content/k7413027q612127k/|contribution = Derrida's language-games|title = TOPOI|volume = 10|pages = 187–98|doi = 10.1007/BF00141339|issue = 2|journal = Topoi|postscript = <!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}</ref> and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like [[Richard Rorty]], [[Alexander Nehamas]],<ref>"Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida," The New Republic 197:14 (October 5, 1987).</ref> and [[Stanley Cavell]], his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as [[John Searle]] and [[Willard Van Orman Quine]], as [[pseudophilosophy]] or [[sophistry]].


Some [[analytic philosopher]]s have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other [[humanities]] disciplines.<ref name="Lamont87"/><ref name="Hansson"/>
In one sense, a sign must point to something beyond itself that is its ''meaning'' so the sign is never fully present in itself but a deferral to something else, to something different. In another sense the [[structural linguistics|structural relationship]] between the signified and signifier, as two related but separate aspects of the sign, is produced through ''differentiation''. Derrida states that différance "is ''the'' economical concept", meaning that it is ''the'' concept of all systems and structures, because "there is no economy without ''différance'' [...] the movement of ''différance'', as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional concepts that mark our language [...] ''différance'' is also the production [...] of these differences."<ref name="Derrida, J. 2002, p. 7" /> Différance is therefore the condition of possibility for all complex systems and hence all philosophy.


In his 1989 ''[[Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity]]'', [[Richard Rorty]] argues that Derrida (especially in his book, ''[[The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]]'') purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.<ref name= a>Rorty, Richard. ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida"</ref>
Operating through différance, deconstruction is the description of how non-presence problematises the operation of the appeal to presence within a particular philosophical system. Différance is an [[A priori and a posteriori|a-priori]] condition of possibility that is always already in effect but a deconstruction must be a careful description of how this différance is actually in effect in a given text. Deconstruction therefore describes problems in the text rather than creating them (which would be trivial). Derrida considers the illustration of [[aporia]] in this way to be productive because it shows the failure of earlier philosophical systems and the necessity of continuing to philosophise through them with deconstruction.


[[Paul R. Gross]] and [[Norman Levitt]] also criticized his work for allegedly misusing scientific terms and concepts in ''[[Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science]]'' (1998).
===''Of Grammatology''===
{{main|Of Grammatology}}
Derrida first employs the term deconstruction in ''Of Grammatology'' in 1967 when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. Here Derrida introduces deconstruction to describe the manner that understanding language as “writing” (in general) renders infeasible a straightforward [[semantic]] theory. Derrida states that:


Two quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.
<blockquote>[w]riting thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos.<ref name="Gramm67p10-11">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', pp. 10-11</ref></blockquote>


====Dispute with John Searle====
In this quotation Derrida states that deconstruction is what happens to meaning when language is understood as writing. For Derrida, when language is understood as writing it is realised that meaning does not originate in the [[logos]] or thought of the language user. Instead individual language users are understood to be using an external system of signs, a system that exists separately to them because these signs are written down. The meaning of language does not originate in the thoughts of the individual language user because those thoughts are already taking place in a language that does not originate with them. Individual language users operate within a system of meaning that is given to them from outside. Meaning is therefore not fully under the control of the individual language user. The meaning of a text is not neatly determined by authorial intention and cannot be recreated without problem by a reader. Meaning necessarily involves some degree of interpretation, negotiation, or translation. This necessity for the active interpretation of meaning by readers when language is understood as writing is why deconstruction takes place.{{citation needed|date=March 2011}}
{{Main|Limited Inc}}
In 1972 Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", an essay on [[J. L. Austin]]'s [[speech act theory]]; following a critique of this text by [[John Searle]] in his 1977 essay ''Reiterating the Differences'', Derrida wrote in the same year ''Limited Inc abc ...'', a long defense of his original argument.


The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the [[philosophy of language]] —referenced in Derrida's ''Signature Event Context''—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]] and [[Étienne Bonnot de Condillac|Condillac]], not to mention [[Plato]]. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is [[Émile Benveniste|Benveniste]] or even [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]]."<ref name="Searle 1994">{{cite journal | last1 = Searle | first1 = John R. | title = Literary Theory and Its Discontents | journal = Journal of Humanistic Psychology | volume = 25 | issue = 3 | pages = 637–67 | year = 1994 | publisher = The Johns Hopkins University Press | url = http://www.jstor.org/stable/469470 }}</ref> Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as [[Ludwig Wittgenstein|pre-Wittgensteinian]]—that is to say, disconnected from the tradition established by [[Gottlob Frege|Frege]] and continued through the work of [[Bertrand Russell|Russell]], [[G. E. Moore|Moore]], [[Ludwig Wittgenstein|Wittgenstein]], [[Rudolf Carnap|Carnap]], [[Alfred Tarski|Tarski]], [[Willard Van Orman Quine|Quine]]—and consequently naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be ''non''-issues.<ref name="Searle 1994"/>
To understand this more fully, consider the difference for Derrida between understanding language as speech and as writing. Derrida argues that people have historically understood speech as the primary mode of language<ref name="Gramm67p7-11quote">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', pp. 7–11, quote: On the historical understanding of language as speech Derrida writes that "These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary" and that "Within this logos [i.e. the western tradition of philosophical thought], the original and essential link to the ''phonè'' has never been broken. It would be easy to demonstrate this and I shall attempt such a demonstration later."</ref> and understood writing as an inferior derivative of speech.<ref name="Gramm67p7auxiliary">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', p. 7; Derrida argues that writing has been considered "a particular, derivative, auxiliary form of language in general"</ref> Derrida argues that speech is historically equated with [[logos]],<ref name="Gramm67p7HearingOneselfSpeak">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', p. 7; Derrida considers the understanding of language as speech "The system of 'hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak' through the phonic substance"</ref> meaning thought, and associated with the presence of the speaker to the listener.<ref name="Gramm67p12">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'': "the co-presence of the other and of the self", p. 12.</ref> It is as if the speaker thinks out loud and the listener hears what the speaker is thinking and if there is any confusion then the speaker's presence allows them to qualify the meaning of a previous statement. Derrida argues that by understanding speech as thought, language "effaces itself."<ref name="Gramm67p11">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', p. 11</ref> Language itself is forgotten. The [[Sign (semiotics)|signified]] meaning of speech is so immediately understood that it is easy to forget that there are linguistic [[Sign (linguistics)|signifiers]] involved; but these signifiers are the spoken sounds ([[phonemes]]) and written marks ([[graphemes]]) that actually comprise language. Derrida therefore associates speech with a very straightforward and unproblematic [[Meaning (philosophy of language)|theory of meaning]] and with the forgetting of the signifier and hence language itself.


Searle argues that the ideas upon which ''deconstruction'' is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. For example, Derrida's conception of ''iterability'' and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the [[type–token distinction]] that exists in current [[linguistics]] and [[philosophy of language]]. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token."<ref name="Searle 1994"/> According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: (a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "nothing exists outside of text" (''il n'y a pas de hors-texte''); (b) when challenged on ''(a)'' respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in ''(a)'' such that it becomes a truism, e.g. ″"''il n'y a pas de hors-texte''" means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts";<ref name="Derrida LI">{{cite book| last1 = Derrida| first1 = Jacques| title = Limited Inc.| edition = 1st| year = 1988| publisher = Northwestern University Press| location = Illinois| isbn = 0810107880| chapter = Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion| page = 136| url = http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-ANhg9zaAtIC| quote = The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ("there is nothing outside the text" [it n y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.}}</ref> (c) when the reformulation from ''(b)'' is acknowledged then proceed as if the ''original'' formulation from ''(a)'' was accepted. The revised idea—for example—that ''everything exists in some context'' is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim—''nothing exists outside of text''—had been established. Searle wrote in ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'' that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."<ref>{{cite web | last = Searle | first = John R. | others = | title = The Word Turned Upside Down | website = The New York Review of Books | publisher = NYREV, Inc | url = http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/oct/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/ | date = 27 October 1983 | accessdate = 21 August 2013 | archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20121013010523/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/oct/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/ | archivedate = 13 October 2012}}</ref>
Derrida contrasts the understanding of language as speech with an understanding of language as writing. Unlike a speaker, a writer is usually absent (even dead) and the reader cannot rely on the writer to clarify any problems that there might be with the meaning of the text. The consideration of language as writing leads inescapably to the insight that language is a system of [[sign (semiotics)|signs]]. As a system of signs the signifiers are present but the signification can only be [[inferred]]. There is effectively an act of translation involved in extracting a significaton from the signifiers of language. This act of translation is so habitual to language users that they must step back from their experience of using language in order to fully realise its operation. The significance of understanding language as writing rather than speech is that [[Sign (linguistics)|signifiers]] are present in language but significations are absent. To decide what words mean is therefore an act of interpretation. The insight that language is a system of signs, most obvious in the consideration of language as writing, leads Derrida to state that "everything [...] gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to [...] the name of writing."<ref name="Gramm67p6">Derrida [1967], ''Of Grammatology'', p. 6</ref> This means that there is no room for the naive theory of meaning and forgetting of the signifier that previously existed when language was understood as speech.


====Cambridge Honorary Doctorate====
Later in his career, in 1980, Derrida retrospectively confirmed the importance of his observation on the devaluation of writing,<ref name="Derrida80p.40">Derrida [1980], p. 40</ref> which proved valid not only for classics of philosophy and the "socio-historical totality" of our civilization, but also for the deconstruction of a variety of modern scientific texts in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis.<ref name="Derrida80p.40"/> Everywhere in these texts, such detection devaluation of writing showed to be "insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive," and " the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees."<ref name="Derrida80p.40"/>
Derrida has often been the target of attacks by [[analytic philosophers]]; an attack of major significance was their 1992 attempt at stopping Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate.<ref name="BarrySmithEtAl"/>


There were protesters from within Cambridge philosophy faculty,{{Citation needed|date=October 2009}} but mostly the letter signatories were from other institutions from the US and UK. Eighteen protesters from other institutions, including [[Willard Van Orman Quine]], [[David Malet Armstrong|David Armstrong]], [[Ruth Barcan Marcus]], and [[René Thom]], sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the [[Dada]]ists." The letter concluded that:
Here Derrida states that deconstruction exposes historical constraints within the whole history of philosophy that have been practised at the price of contradictions, denials, and dogmatic decrees. The unmasking of how contradictions, denials, and dogmatic decrees are at work in a given text is closely associated with deconstruction. The careful illustration of how such problems are inescapable in a given text can lead someone to describe that text as ''deconstructed''.


<blockquote>... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.:<ref name="BarrySmithEtAl"/></blockquote>
===''Speech and Phenomena''===
{{main|Speech and Phenomena}}
Derrida's first book length deconstruction is his critical engagement with Husserl's phenomenology in ''Speech and Phenomena'' published in 1967. Derrida states that ''Speech and Phenomena'' is the "essay I value the most"<ref>Derrida, J., 1981. ''Positions''. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, p. 13.</ref> and it is therefore a very important example of deconstruction.


In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a vote.<ref name="prelectur.stanford.edu"/> Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."<ref name="CambridgeInterviewOct92"/><ref name="Derrida90Liberation"/>
Husserl's philosophy is grounded in conscious experience as the ultimate origin of validity for all philosophy and science. Derrida's deconstruction operates by illustrating how the originary status of consciousness is compromised by the operation of structures within conscious experience that prevent it from being "the original self-giving evidence, the ''present'' or ''presence'' of sense to a full and primordial intuition."<ref>Derrida, J. 1973. ''Speech and Phenomena''. Trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, p. 5.</ref> Derrida argues that Husserl's "phenomenology seems to us tormented, if not contested from within, by its own descriptions of the movement of temporalization and language."<ref name="Derrida, J 1973, p. 6">Derrida, J. 1973. ''Speech and Phenomena''. Trans. D.B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, p. 6.</ref> Derrida argues that the involvement of language and temporalisation within the "living present"<ref name="Derrida, J 1973, p. 6"/> of conscious experience means that instead of consciousness being the pure unitary origin of validity that Husserl wishes it be, it is compromised by the operation of différance in the structures of language and temporalisation.


====Dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB====
Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the ''différance'' between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self-sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the ''intentional meaning of the speaking subject''. This conclusion is very important for deconstruction and explains the importance of ''Speech and Phenomena'' for Derrida. Informed by this conclusion the deconstruction of a text will typically demonstrate the inability of the author to achieve their stated intentions within a text by demonstrating how the meaning of the language they use is, at least partially, beyond the ability of their intentions to control. Similarly, Derrida argues that Husserl's description of temporal consciousness — where he describes the retension of past conscious experience and protension of future conscious experience — introduces the structural ''différance'' of temporal deferral, temporal non-presence, into consciousness. This means that the past and future are not in the living present of conscious experience but they taint the presence of the living present with their conscious absence through retension and protension. Husserl's description of temporal consciousness therefore compromises the total self presence of conscious experience required by Husserl's philosophy once again.
[[Richard Wolin]] has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism.{{Page needed|date=November 2010}} For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".<ref name="Wolin93Preface">Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin(Ed.) ''The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader.'' Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p xiii. ISBN 0-262-73101-0</ref> In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of ''The Heidegger Controversy'', Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of ''The Heidegger Controversy'' by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in ''[[The New York Review of Books]],'' in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.<ref name="NYRBLetters">[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2658], [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2591]</ref> Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book ''[[Points...]]''.<ref name="DerridaOnNYRB">Derrida, "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," published in the book ''[[Points...]]'' (1995; see the footnote about [[Special:BookSources/0226143147|ISBN 0-226-14314-7]], [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|here]]) (see also the [1992] French Version ''[[Points de suspension: entretiens]]'' ([[Special:BookSources/0804724881|ISBN 0-8047-2488-1]]) [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|there]]).</ref>


Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to ''The New York Review of Books'', in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.<ref name="PointsP434">''Points'', p. 434</ref>
===''Writing and Difference''===
{{main|Writing and Difference}}
''Writing and Difference'' is a collection of essays published by Derrida in 1967. Each essay is a critical negotiation by Derrida of texts by philosophical or literary writers. These essays have come to be termed deconstructions even though some of them were written before Derrida's first use of the term in ''Of Grammatology''. For example, the chapter "Cogito and the History of Madness," dating from 1963, has been referred to as a deconstruction of the work of Michel Foucault, yet the term "deconstruction" does not actually appear in the chapter.<ref>[[Gayatri Spivak]] in her introduction to her translation of Derrida's ''Of Grammatology'' refers to "Cogito and the History of Madness" as a deconstruction.</ref>


===Derrida's later work===
===African bias===
[[Christopher Wise]] in his book ''Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East'' (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by [[Robert J.C. Young]] in ''White Mythologies: Writing History and the West'' (1990){{Page needed|date=November 2010}} and extended in his ''Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction'' (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria.{{Page needed|date=November 2010}} In contrast, Wise compares Derrida's thought to precolonial notions of the word that are rooted in ancient Egyptian and African society. Wise argues that Derridean concept of spirit/specter as occult [[Pharmakos|pharmakon]] is indebted not only to the Hebraic notion of ''ruah'' but also the Egyptian ''heka'', Soninke ''naxamala'', Mande ''nyama'', and many other comparable Egypto-African concepts of the word, some that are historically prior to the Hebraic ''ruah''. Wise suggests that Derrida deliberately elides related African concepts of the word in order to accord Judaism a place of special prominence within the history of European philosophy. He argues instead that European philosophy must acknowledge its historical indebtedness to Middle Eastern and African thought, which is not limited to the influence of Judaism alone.
While Derrida's deconstructions in the 1960s and 1970s were frequently concerned with the major philosophical systems, in his later work he is often concerned to demonstrate the aporias of specific terms and concepts, including forgiveness, hospitality, friendship, the gift, responsibility and cosmopolitanism.


===Hostile obituaries===
==Development after Derrida==
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in ''[[The New York Times]],''<ref name=kandell2004>Kandell, Jonathan. "[http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html?ex=1255147200&en=bc84f1b2c5f092c5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74]", October 10, 2004</ref> ''[[The Economist]]''<ref>''The Economist''. [http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3308320 Obituary: Jacques Derrida, French intellectual], Oct 21, 2004</ref> and ''[[The Independent]]''.<ref>[http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/why-i-wont-be-mourning-derrida-543574.html The Independent]</ref> The magazine ''[[The Nation]]'' responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."<ref name="Culler08"/><ref name="NationObituaries">Ross Benjamin ''[http://www.thenation.com/article/hostile-obituary-derrida Hostile Obituary for Derrida]'', [[The Nation]], November 24, 2004</ref>
Authors other than Derrida have also used the term "deconstructionism" with different definitions.<ref>"Glossary Definition: Deconstructionism." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. 5 Dec. 2010 ([http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/decon-body.html online]).</ref>


===The Yale School===
==Works by Derrida==
{{Main|Jacques Derrida bibliography}}
{{Further|Yale school}}
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including [[Paul de Man]], [[Geoffrey Hartman]], and [[J. Hillis Miller]]. This group came to be known as the [[Yale school (deconstruction)|Yale school]] and was especially influential in [[literary criticism]]. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the [[University of California Irvine]].{{Citation needed|date=April 2010}}


'''Selected translations of works by Derrida'''
Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air."<ref>J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure," ''Georgia Review'' 30 (1976), p. 34.</ref>
* ''[[Speech and Phenomena|"Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs]]'', trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

* ''[[Of Grammatology]]'', trans. [[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]] (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) (hardcover: ISBN 0-8018-1841-9, paperback: ISBN 0-8018-1879-6, corrected edition: ISBN 0-8018-5830-5).<ref>{{cite web|author=Jacques Derrida |url=http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm |title=Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida |publisher=Marxists.org |date= |accessdate=21 October 2012}}</ref>
===Critical legal studies movement===
* ''[[Writing and Difference]]'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) ISBN 978-0-226-14329-3.
{{Further|Critical legal studies}}
* ''[[Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles]]'', trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1979, ISBN 978-0-226-14333-0).
Arguing that law and politics cannot be separated, the founders of "Critical Legal Studies Movement" found necessary to criticize its absence at the level of theory. To demonstrate the [[Indeterminacy (philosophy)|indeterminacy]] of legal doctrine, these scholars often adopts a method, such as [[structuralism]] in [[linguistics]] or deconstruction in [[Continental philosophy]], to make explicit the deep structure of categories and tensions at work in legal texts and talk. The aim was to deconstruct the tensions and procedures by which they are constructed, expressed, and deployed.
* ''[[The Archeology of the Frivolous|The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac]]'', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

* ''[[Dissemination (Derrida)|Dissemination]]'', trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-226-14334-7).
For example, [[Duncan Kennedy (legal philosopher)|Duncan Kennedy]], in explicit reference to semiotics and deconstruction procedures, maintains that various legal doctrines are constructed around the binary pairs of opposed concepts, each of which with a claim upon intuitive and formal forms of reasoning that must be made explicit, not only in their meaning but also its relative value, and criticized. Self and other, private and public, subjective and objective, freedom and control are examples of such pairs demonstrating the influence of this opposing concepts on the development of legal doctrines through history.<ref name="Critical Legal Studies Movement"/>
* ''[[Positions (book)|Positions]]'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-226-14331-6) [Paris, Minuit, 1972].

* ''[[Margins of Philosophy]]'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, ISBN 978-0-226-14326-2).
===''Deconstructing History''===
* ''[[Signsponge]]'', trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Deconstructive readings of history and sources have changed the entire discipline of history. In "Deconstructing History", [[Alun Munslow]] examines history in what he argues is a postmodern age. He provides an introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. He also surveys the latest research into the relationship between the past, history, and historical practice, as well as forwarding his own challenging theories.<ref name="Edn. Routledge 2006"/>
* ''[[The Ear of the Other]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

* ''[[Glas (book)|Glas]]'', trans. [[John P. Leavey, Jr.]] & Richard Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
===''The Inoperative Community''===
* ''[[Memoires for Paul de Man]]'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; revised edn., 1989).
[[Jean-Luc Nancy]] argues in his 1982 book ''The Inoperative Community'' for an understanding of community and society that is undeconstructable because it is prior to conceptualisation. Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida.
* ''[[The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond]]'', trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-226-14322-4).

* ''The Truth in Painting'', trans. [[Geoffrey Bennington]] & Ian McLeod (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-226-14324-8).
===''The Ethics of Deconstruction''===
* ''[[Limited Inc]]'' (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
[[Simon Critchley]] argues in his 1992 book (second edition: 1999; third edition: 2014) ''The Ethics of Deconstruction'' that Derrida's deconstruction is an intrinsically ethical practice. Critchley argues that deconstruction involves an openness to the [[other]] that makes it ethical in the [[Emmanuel Levinas|Levinasian]] understanding of the term.
* ''[[Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction]]'', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

* ''[[Of Spirit|Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question]]'', trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-226-14319-4).
===''Derrida and the Political''===
* ''[[Cinders (book)|Cinders]]'', trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
Jacques Derrida has had a huge influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek, Richard Rorty, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists developed a deconstructive approach to politics. Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought, and as such it has proved revolutionary in political analysis, particularly ideology critiques.<ref>The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy [Paperback] Martin McQuillan (Editor)</ref>
* ''[[Acts of Literature]]'' (New York & London: Routledge, 1992).

* ''[[Given Time|Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-14314-9).
Richard Beardsworth, developing on Critchley's ''Ethics of Deconstruction'', argues in his 1996 ''Derrida and the Political'' that deconstruction is an intrinsically political practice. He further argues that the future of deconstruction faces a choice (perhaps an undecidable choice) between a [[deconstruction-and-religion|theological]] approach and a technological approach represented first of all by the work of [[Bernard Stiegler]].
* ''[[The Other Heading|The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe]]'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).

* ''[[Aporias]]'', trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
==Influences==
* ''[[Jacques Derrida (book)|Jacques Derrida]]'', co-author & trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-226-04262-6).
Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] (whose writings on [[semiotics]] also became a cornerstone of structuralist theory in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as [[Roland Barthes]] (whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood opposed to the theories of structuralists such as psychoanalytic theorist [[Jacques Lacan]], linguist [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], and political and social theorist [[Michel Foucault]]. However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as "[[Post-structuralism|post-structuralist]]".{{Citation needed|reason=Correct but this entire paragraph needs references|date=December 2013}}
* ''[[Memoirs of the Blind|Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins]]'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-226-14308-8).

* ''[[Specters of Marx|Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994).
==Criticisms==
* ''[[Archive Fever|Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression]]'', trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-226-14367-5).
Derrida has been involved in a number of high profile disagreements with prominent philosophers including [[Michel Foucault]], [[John Searle]], [[Willard Van Orman Quine]], [[Peter Kreeft]], and [[Jürgen Habermas]]. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers and repeated elsewhere.
* ''[[The Gift of Death]]'', trans. David Wills (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-226-14306-4).

* ''[[On the Name]]'', trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., & Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
===Michel Foucault===
* ''[[Points...: Interviews 1974-1994]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) (see also the footnote about [[Special:BookSources/0226143147|ISBN 0-226-14314-7]], [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|here]]) (see also the [1992] French Version ''[[Points de suspension: entretiens]]'' ([[Special:BookSources/0804724881|ISBN 0-8047-2488-1]]) [[Jacques Derrida bibliography|there]]).
[[Michel Foucault]] was the subject of Derrida's early paper "[[Cogito and the History of Madness]]" in which Derrida makes the controversial claim that: <blockquote>
* ''[[Chora L Works]]'', with [[Peter Eisenman]] (New York: Monacelli, 1997).
In this 673-page book ([[wikt:sc.|sc.]] ''[[History of Madness]]''), Michel Foucault devotes three pages- and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter — to a certain passage from the first of [[Descartes]]'s Meditations. [... in] alleging — correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined — that the sense of Foucault's entire project can be pinpointed in these few allusive and somewhat enigmatic pages, and that the reading of Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engages in its problematic the totality of this History of Madness...<ref>Derrida, J., 1978. Cogito and the History of Madness. In Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. London and New York: Routledge, p. 37.</ref></blockquote> The audacity of Derrida's claim to problematise the whole of the ''History of Madness'' by working with such a small section of the text outraged Foucault. Foucault responds in the new preface to the 1972 edition of the ''[[Madness and Civilisation|History of Madness]]'' by complaining that after the initial publication of the text "fragments of it pass into circulation and are passed off as the real thing."<ref>Foucault, M., 2006. History of Madness. Trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa, edited by J. Khalfa. London and New York: Routledge, p. xxxvii.</ref> This comment may form the basis of the allegation that deconstruction does not adhere to conventional academic standards by failing to deal substantially with the texts it appears to criticise. Foucault also states in the appendix to the 1972 edition titled "My Body, This Paper, This Fire" that Derrida's deconstruction is a:<blockquote>
* ''[[Politics of Friendship]]'', trans. George Collins (London & New York: Verso, 1997).
[H]istorically well-determined little pedagogy, which manifests itself here in a very visible manner. A pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text, but that in it, in its interstices, in its blanks and silences, the reserve of the origin reigns; that it is never necessary to look beyond it, but that here, not in the words of course, but in words as crossings-outs [sic], in their ''lattice'', what is said is "the meaning of being". A pedagogy that inversely gives to the voice of the masters that unlimited sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text.<ref>Foucault, M., 2006. History of Madness. Trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa, edited by J. Khalfa. London and New York: Routledge, p. 573.</ref></blockquote>
* ''[[Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin]]'', trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

* ''[[Resistances of Psychoanalysis]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
This rebuke by Foucault caused a rift between the two thinkers and they did not speak to each other for ten years. Foucault refers in this passage to certain claims that Derrida makes in ''Of Grammatology'', though without quotation or citation to indicate that he is doing so. Foucault's mention of "crossings-outs" refers to the return to problematic terms under erasure (see the section on Derrida's negative descriptions of deconstruction). Foucault also alludes critically to the problematisation of presence in deconstruction as a reading of what is not there in the text. This aspect of Foucault's argument may have encouraged Derrida to strongly emphasise the importance of fidelity to the text being deconstructed. Foucault's reference to Derrida's assertion that "there is nothing outside the text" is the basis of much criticism of deconstruction as being [[Nihilism|nihilistic]], [[Moral relativity|relativistic]], [[Apoliticism|apolitical]], or confined to the [[ivory tower]] of academia.{{or|date=May 2013}} In fact, this infamous quote is subtly but essentially mistranslated (as Foucault well knew, and thus this acknowledgement does not necessarily confute his argument), and literally reads "there is no outside-text (''il n'y a pas hors-texte'')," or, as Derrida himself paraphrased it in ''Limited Inc.'', "there is nothing outside context." Thus, Derrida does not argue that only what is written in the text is relevant to it, but rather that no text can or should be interpreted without considering the various "external" factors (historical, biographical, material, ideological, etc.) that contributed to its production. At the same time, according to Derrida, these allegedly "external" phenomena (e.g. "humanism," "the age of enlightenment," "logic," and, perhaps most importantly, "human nature") need to be considered as historically contingent (i.e. as subject to contextualization and thus critical reading) rather than as immutable and inevitable facts of life.
* ''[[The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud]]'', with Paule Thévenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 1998).

* ''[[Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas]]'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
===John Searle===
* ''[[Rights of Inspection]]'', trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli, 1999).
Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", a paper in which he critically engages with [[J. L. Austin|Austin]]'s analytic [[philosophy of language]]. [[John Searle]] is a prominent supporter of Austin's philosophy and objected to "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate [[obscurantism]] of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."<ref>"[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5964 An Exchange on Deconstructionism]", The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1 #34, February 2, 1984.
* ''[[Demeure: Fiction and Testimony]]'', with [[Maurice Blanchot]], ''The Instant of My Death'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
{{quotation|...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.}}</ref>
* ''[[Of Hospitality]]'', trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

* ''[[Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars]]'' (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001).
In 1983, Searle told to ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'' a remark on Derrida allegedly made by [[Michel Foucault]] in a private conversation with Searle himself. Searle's quote was:<ref>[http://free--expression.blogspot.com/2007/10/john-searle-on-derrida.html "The Word Turned Upside Down"] by John Searle</ref>
* ''[[On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness]]'', trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).

* ''[[A Taste for the Secret]]'', with [[:It:Maurizio Ferraris|Maurizio Ferraris]], trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
{{quotation|Michel Foucault once characterized Derrida's prose style to me as "''obscurantisme terroriste''." The text is written so obscurely that you can't figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence "''obscurantisme''") and when one criticizes it, the author says, "''Vous m'avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot' (hence "''terroriste''")}}
* ''[[The Work of Mourning]]'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-226-14281-4).

* ''[[Acts of Religion]]'' (New York & London: Routledge, 2002).
In 1988, Derrida wrote "Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion", to be published with the previous essays in the collection ''Limited Inc''. Commenting this critics in a footnote he questioned:<ref name=limitedinc>Derrida, Jacques. ''Limited, Inc.'' Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 158.</ref>
* ''[[Echographies of Television|Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews]]'', with [[Bernard Stiegler]], trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
{{quotation| I just want to raise the question of what precisely a philosopher is doing when, in a newspaper with a large circulation, he finds himself compelled to cite private and unverifiable insults of another philosopher in order to authorize himself to insult in turn and to practice what in French is called ajugement d'autorite, that is, the method and preferred practice of all dogmatism. I do not know whether the fact of citing in French suffices to guarantee the authenticity of a citation when it concerns a private opinion. I do not exclude the possibility that Foucault may have said such things, alas! That is a different question, which would have to be treated separately. But as he is dead, I will not in my turn cite the judgment which, as I have been told by those who were close to him, Foucault is supposed to have made concerning the practice of Searle in this case and on the act that consisted in making this use of an alleged citation.” }}
* ''[[Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy]]'', trans Peter Pericles Trifonas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

* ''[[Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001]]'', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
In the main text he argued that Searle avoided reading him<ref name=limitedinc>Derrida, Jacques. <u>Limited, Inc.</u> Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 29:
* ''[[Who's Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1]]'', trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
"...I have read some of his [Searle's] work (more, in any case, than he seems to have read of mine)"[http://books.google.com/books?id=-ANhg9zaAtIC]</ref> and did not try to understand him and even that, perhaps, he was not able to understand, and how certain practices of academic politeness or impoliteness could result in a form of brutality that he disapproved of and would like to disarm, in his fashion.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Afterwords" in 'Limited, Inc.' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 158,
* ''[[Without Alibi]]'', trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
{{quotation| beneath an often quite manifest exterior, Searle had read me, or rather avoided reading me and trying to understand. And why, perhaps, he was not able to read me, why this inability was exemplary and symptomatic. And for him lasting, doubtless irreversible, as I have since learned through the press. In a more general way, I wanted to show how certain practices of academic politeness or impoliteness could result in a form of brutality that I disapprove of and would like to disarm, in my fashion. To put it even more generally, and perhaps more essentially, I would have wished to make legible the (philosophical, ethical, political) axiomatics hidden beneath the code of academic discussion.}}</ref>
* ''[[Philosophy in a Time of Terror|Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida]]'', with [[Jürgen Habermas]] (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-226-06666-0).

* ''[[The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy]]'', trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-226-14315-6).
Much more important in terms of theoretical consequences, Derrida criticized Searle's work for pretending to talk about "intention" without being aware of traditional texts about the subject and without even understanding Husserl's work when talking about it.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Afterwords" in 'Limited, Inc.' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 130, {{quotation| My frequenting of philosophies and phenomenologies of intentionality, beginning with that of Husserl, has only caused my uncertainty to increase, as well as my distrust of this word or of this figure, I hardly dare to say "concept." And since that time, Searle's book on intentionality (1983) has not helped me, not in the slightest, to dispel these concerns.
* ''[[Counterpath]]'', with [[Catherine Malabou]], trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
I did not read it without interest, far from it. I am even ready to admire how the author of a book bearing this title, Intentionality, could choose, as he declares at the very outset, in the Introduction, to "pass over in silence" "whole philosophical movements" which "have been built around theories of intentionality," avowing, as one of his reasons, " ignorance of most of the traditional writings on Intentionality" (p. ix). Something that is indeed evident in reading the seven lines devoted to Husserl in this book of three hundred pages.}}</ref> Because he ignored the tradition he rested blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Afterwords" in ''Limited, Inc.'' (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 131
* ''[[Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2]]'', trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

* ''[[For What Tomorrow...: A Dialogue]]'', with [[Elisabeth Roudinesco]], trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
{{quotation| I now have to add this: it is often because "Searle" ignores this tradition or pretends to take no account of it that he rests blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions, not to mention the deconstructive ones. It is because in appearance at least "I" am more of a historian that I am a less passive, more attentive and more "deconstructive" heir of that so-called tradition. And hence, perhaps again paradoxically, more foreign to that tradition. I put quotation marks around "Searle" and I to mark that beyond these indexes, I am aiming at tendencies, types, styles, or situations rather than at persons.}}</ref>
* ''[[Rogues: Two Essays on Reason]]'', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

* ''[[On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy]]'', trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Derrida would even argue that in a certain way he was more close to Austin, than Searle that, in fact, was more close to Continental philosophers that himself tried to criticize.<ref>Jacques Derrida, "Afterwords" in 'Limited, Inc.' (Northwestern University Press, 1988) (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 131,
* ''[[Paper Machine]]'', trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

* ''[[Sovereignties in Question|Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan]]'', trans. Thomas Dutoit (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
{{quotation| Searle had written, "It would be a mistake, I think, to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions."
* ''[[H. C. for Life: That Is to Say...]]'', trans. Laurent Milesi & Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
I agree with the letter if not with the intention of this declaration, having made it clear that I sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin than to a certain Continental tradition from which Searle, on the contrary, has inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct.}}
* ''[[Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius|Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, And Genius: The Secrets of the Archive]]'', trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
</ref>
* ''[[Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview]]'', with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Melville House, 2007).

* ''[[Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I]]'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
===Jürgen Habermas===
* ''[[Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II]]'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
In ''[[The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity]]'', [[Jürgen Habermas]] criticized what he considered Derrida's opposition to [[Rationality|rational discourse]].<ref>Jürgen Habermas (1987), ''The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity'' (trans. Frederick Lawrence), MIT Press, ISBN 0-7456-0830-2, pp. 185–210.</ref>
* ''[[The Animal That Therefore I Am]]'', trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

* ''[[The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I]]'', trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-226-14428-3).
Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's insistence on [[etymology]] and [[philology]]{{citation needed|date=May 2013}} (see ''[[Etymological fallacy]]'').
* ''[[Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography]]'', ed. and trans. Gerhard Richter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

* ''[[Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme]]'', trans. Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
===Walter A. Davis===
* ''[[Parages]]'', ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey, and Avital Ronell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
The American philosopher [[Walter A. Davis]], in ''Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud'', argues that both deconstruction and structuralism are prematurely arrested moments of a dialectical movement that issues in Hegelian "unhappy consciousness."<ref>[[Walter A. Davis|Davis, Walter A.]] ''Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud''. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.{{page needed|date=May 2013}}</ref>
* ''[[The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II]]'', trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN 978-0-226-14430-6).

* ''[[Signature Derrida]]'', ed. Jay Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN 978-0-226-92452-6).
===In popular media===
* ''[[The Death Penalty, Volume I]]'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-226-14432-0).
Popular criticism of deconstruction also intensified following the [[Sokal affair]], which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstruction as a whole, despite the absence of Derrida from Sokal's follow-up book ''Impostures intellectuelles''.<ref>{{cite web
| url = http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
| title = A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
| accessdate = April 3, 2007
| last = Sokal
| first = Alan D.
| authorlink = Alan Sokal
| work = [[Lingua Franca (magazine)|Lingua Franca]]
|date=May 1996
}}</ref>


==See also==
==See also==
*[[List of deconstructionists]]
* [[List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction]]
* [[Deconstruction and religion]]
*[[Hermeneutics]]
*[[Post-structuralism]]
* [[Différance]]
*[[Post-modernism]]
* [[Sous rature]]
* [[Yale school]]


==Notes==
==Notes==
Line 464: Line 341:


==References (works cited)==
==References (works cited)==
*[[Geoffrey Bennington]] (1991) ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=kL4AdWgYe6AC Jacques Derrida]'', University of Chicago Press. Section ''Curriculum vitae'' pp.&nbsp;325–36, [http://lebonusage.over-blog.com/article-30028638.html Excerpts]
*Derrida, Jacques [1967] (1978). ''Of Grammatology'', trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5830-7
*[[John D. Caputo|Caputo, John D.]] (ed.) (1997) ''Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida''. New York: Fordham University Press. Transcript (which is also available [http://web.archive.org/web/20060901145759/www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/vill1.html here]) of the Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida at [[Villanova University]], October 3, 1994. With commentary by Caputo.
*Derrida, Jacques. ''Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs''. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. ISBN 978-0-8101-0590-4.
* [[Hélène Cixous|Cixous, Hélène]] (2001) ''Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint'' (English edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
*Derrida, Jacques. ''Positions''. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. ISBN 978-0-226-14331-6
*Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, republished in ''[[Positions]]'' (English edition, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
*Derrida [1980], ''The time of a thesis: punctuations'', first published in:
*Derrida (1971) interview with Guy Scarpetta, republished in ''Positions'' (English edition, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
*Derrida [1988], ''Limited Inc''
*Derrida (1976) ''Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends'', republished in ''[[Who's Afraid of Philosophy?]]''
*Derrida [1990], ''[[Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2]]'', pp.&nbsp;113–128
*Derrida (1988) ''Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion'', published in the English translation of ''[[Limited Inc.]]''
*Derrida, Jacques [1983], [http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Simulate/Derrida_deconstruction.html ''Letter to A Japanese Friend''], in [[David Wood (philosopher)|Wood, David]] and [[Robert Bernasconi|Bernasconi, Robert]] (eds., 1988) [http://books.google.com/books?id=kHFkwQOBjPYC ''Derrida and Différance''], Warwick: Parousia, 1985
*Derrida (1989) ''This Strange Institution Called Literature'', interview published in ''[[Acts of Literature]]'' (1991), pp.&nbsp;33–75
*Klein, Anne Carolyn (1995), ''Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self''. Boston: Beacon, 1995. ISBN 978-0-8070-7306-3.
*Derrida (1990) ''Once Again from the Top: Of the Right to Philosophy'', interview with [[Robert Maggiori]] for ''[[Libération]]'', November 15, 1990, republished in ''[[Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994]]'' (1995).
*Montefiore, Alan (ed., 1983), ''Philosophy in France Today'' Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp.&nbsp;34–50
*Derrida (1991) "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking", interview with Francois Ewald for ''Le Magazine Litteraire'', March 1991, republished in ''[[Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994]]'' (1995).
*Moynihan, Robert (1986), ''Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller''. Shoe String, 1986. ISBN 978-0-208-02120-5.
*Derrida (1992) Derrida's interview in ''The Cambridge Review'' 113, October 1992. Reprinted in ''Points...: Interviews, 1974–1994'' Stanford University Press (1995) and retitled as ''Honoris Causa'': "This is ''also'' extremely funny," pp.&nbsp;399–421. [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/interviews.html#cambridge Excerpt].
*[[Richard Rorty|Rorty, Richard]], "From Formalism to Poststructuralism". ''The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism'', vol. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
*Derrida (1993) ''[[Specters of Marx]]''
*Derrida ''et al.'' (1994) roundtable discussion: [http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/derrida.html ''Of the Humanities and Philosophical Disciplines''] Surfaces Vol. VI.108 (v.1.0A – August 16, 1996) – ISSN: 1188-2492 Later republished in ''[[Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy]]'' (2002).
*Derrida and Ferraris (1997) ''I Have a Taste for Secret'', 1993–5 conversations with [[Maurizio Ferraris]] and Giorgio Vattimo, in Derrida and Ferraris [1997] [http://books.google.com/books?id=QzSowXaPwBsC ''A Taste for the Secret''], translated by Giacomo Donis
*Derrida (1997) interview ''Les Intellectuels: tentative de définition par eux-mêmes. Enquête'', published in a special number of journal ''[[Lignes]]'', 32 (1997): 57–68, republished in ''[http://www.editions-galilee.fr/f/index.php?sp=liv&livre_id=2796 Papier Machine]'' (2001), and translated into English as '' Intellectuals. Attempt at Definition by Themselves. Survey'', in Derrida (2005) ''[[Paper machine (Derrida)|Paper machine]]''
*Derrida (2002) Q&A session at [[Film Forum]], New York City, October 23, 2002, transcript by [[Gil Kofman]]. Published in Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Jacques Derrida (2005) [http://books.google.com/books?id=ICD8tI-LSOUC ''Derrida: screenplay and essays on the film'']
*[[Gerald Graff|Graff, Gerald]] (1993) [http://books.google.com/books?id=2EwLAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA680 ''Is Reason in Trouble?''] in ''[[Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society]]'', 137, no. 4, 1993, pp.&nbsp;680–88.
*[[Lawrence D. Kritzman|Kritzman, Lawrence]] (ed., 2005) ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=bREQibN9i-sC The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought]'', Columbia University Press
*[[Louis H. Mackey|Mackey, Louis]] (1984) with a reply by [[John Searle|Searle]]. [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1984/feb/02/an-exchange-on-deconstruction/ ''An Exchange on Deconstruction''], in ''[[New York Review of Books]]'', February 2, 1984
*Peeters, Benoît (2012) ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=DtPkwZJpGPYC Derrida: A Biography]'' (Polity)
*[[Jason Powell|Powell, Jason]] (2006) ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=sbhlgspwVwMC Jacques Derrida: A Biography]'' (London and New York: Continuum)
*[[Mark Poster|Poster, Mark]] (1988) [http://books.google.com/books?id=-OnWAAAAMAAJ ''Critical theory and poststructuralism: in search of a context''], section ''Introduction: Theory and the problem of Context''
*[[Mark Poster|Poster, Mark]] (2010) [http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/viewFile/11931/8817 ''McLuhan and the Cultural Theory of Media''], ''MediaTropes eJournal'', Vol II, No 2 (2010): 1–18
*[[John Searle|Searle]] (1983) ''[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1983/oct/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/ The Word Turned Upside Down]'', in ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'' October 1983
*[[John Searle|Searle]] (2000) ''[http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle]'' Reason.com February 2000 issue, accessed online on 30-08-2010


==Further reading==
==Further reading – works on Derrida==
'''Introductory works'''
{{Refbegin}}
*Adleman, Dan (2010) "Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory" ([http://www.improvcommunity.ca/sites/improvcommunity.ca/files/research_collection/657/Coleman_Derrida_Genre.pdf PDF])
*Breckman, Warren, “Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory,” ''Journal of the History of Ideas'', vol. 71, no. 3 (July 2010), 339–361 ([http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/ online]).
*Culler, Jonathan (1975) ''Structuralist Poetics''.
*[[Simon Critchley|Critchley, Simon]]. ''The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas'', Third Edition, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7486-8932-3.
*[[Jonathan Culler|Culler, Jonathan]]. ''On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism'', Cornell University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-8014-1322-3.
*Culler, Jonathan (1983) ''On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism''.
*Descombes, Vincent (1980) ''Modern French Philosophy''.
*[[Eagleton, Terry]]. ''Literary Theory: An Introduction'', University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ISBN 978-0-8166-1251-2
*Ellis, John M.. ''Against Deconstruction'', Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. ISBN 978-0-691-06754-4.
*Deutscher, Penelope (2006) ''How to Read Derrida'' (ISBN 978-0-393-32879-0).
*Goldschmit, Marc (2003) ''Jacques Derrida, une introduction" Paris, Agora Pocket, ISBN 2-266-11574-X.
*[[Barbara Johnson|Johnson, Barbara]]. ''The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading''. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. ISBN 978-0-801-82458-6
*[[Leslie Hill|Hill, Leslie]] (2007) [http://books.google.com/books?id=oWoAcsayEz8C ''The Cambridge introduction to Jacques Derrida'']
*[[Simon Reynolds|Reynolds, Simon]], ''Rip It Up and Start Again'', New York: Penguin, 2006, pp.&nbsp;316. ISBN 978-0-143-03672-2. <small>(Source for the information about Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, and deconstructionism.)</small>
*[[Fredric Jameson|Jameson, Fredric]] (1972) ''The Prison-House of Language''.
*Stocker, Barry, ''Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction'', Routledge, 2006. ISBN 978-1-134-34381-2
*Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) ''Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction''.
*Wortham, Simon Morgan, ''The Derrida Dictionary'', Continuum, 2010. ISBN 978-1-847-06526-1
*Lentricchia, Frank (1980) ''After the New Criticism''.
{{Refend}}
*Moati Raoul (2009), Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire
*Norris, Christopher (1982) ''Deconstruction: Theory and Practice''.
*Thomas, Michael (2006) ''[[The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation]]''.
*[[Christopher Wise|Wise, Christopher]] (2009) ''Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East''.

'''Other works'''
* [[Giorgio Agamben|Agamben, Giorgio.]] "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, ''Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy,'' ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205-19.
*Beardsworth, Richard, ''Derrida and the Political'' (ISBN 0-415-10967-1).
*[[Geoffrey Bennington|Bennington, Geoffrey]], ''Legislations'' (ISBN 0-86091-668-5).
*Bennington, Geoffrey, ''Interrupting Derrida'' (ISBN 0-415-22427-6).
*[[John D. Caputo|Caputo, John D.]], ''The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida''.
*Coward, H.G. (ed) ''Derrida and [[Negative theology]]'', SUNY 1992. ISBN 0-7914-0964-3
*[[Paul de Man|de Man, Paul]], "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, ''Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism,'' second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102-41.
*[[Nader El-Bizri|El-Bizri, Nader]], 'Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), 473-490.
* Fabbri, Lorenzo. [http://www.academia.edu/1870908/Chronotopologies_of_the_Exception_Agamben_and_Derrida_before_the_Camps "Chronotopologies of the Exception. Agamben and Derrida before the Camps"], "Diacritics," Volume 39, Number 3 (2009): 77-95.
*[[Michel Foucault|Foucault, Michel]], "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault, ''History of Madness,'' ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550-74.
*[[Rodolphe Gasché|Gasché, Rodolphe]], ''Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida''.
*Gasché, Rodolphe, ''The Tain of the Mirror''.
*Goldschmit, Marc, ''Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique'' Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006. ISBN 2-84938-058-X
*[[Jürgen Habermas|Habermas, Jürgen]], "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas, ''The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures,'' trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
*[[Martin Hägglund|Hägglund, Martin]], ''Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life'', Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
*[[Werner Hamacher|Hamacher, Werner]], ''Lingua amissa'', Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila editores, 2012.
*{{Cite journal | last=Kierans | first=Kenneth | title=Beyond Deconstruction| journal=[[Animus (journal)|Animus]] | year=1997 | volume=2 | url=http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%202/kierans1.pdf|issn=1209-0689|accessdate=August 17, 2011 | postscript=.}}
*[[Mario Kopić|Kopić, Mario]], ''Izazovi post-metafizike'', Sremski Karlovci - Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica, 2007. (ISBN 978-86-7543-120-6)
*[[Mario Kopić|Kopić, Mario]], ''Nezacjeljiva rana svijeta'', Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2007. (ISBN 978-953-249-035-0)
* [[Louis H. Mackey|Mackey, Louis]], "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology," in ''Anglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3'', July, 1983. 255–272.
* [[Louis H. Mackey|Mackey, Louis]], "A Nicer Knowledge of Belief" in Loius Mackey, ''An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature'', Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219–240 (ISBN 978-0761822677)
*[[Robert Magliola|Magliola, Robert]], ''Derrida on the Mend'', Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN 0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
*[[Robert Magliola|Magliola, Robert]], ''On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture'', Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
*[[Michael Marder|Marder, Michael]], ''[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802098924 The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism]'', Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN 0-8020-9892-4)
*[[J. Hillis Miller|Miller, J. Hillis]], ''For Derrida,'' New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
*[[Chantal Mouffe|Mouffe, Chantal]] (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Pragmatism'', with essays by [[Simon Critchley]], [[Ernesto Laclau]], [[Richard Rorty]], and Derrida.
*[[Christopher Norris (critic)|Norris, Christopher]], ''Derrida'' (ISBN 0-674-19823-9).
*Park, Jin Y., ed., ''Buddhisms and Deconstructions'', Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
*Rapaport, Herman, ''Later Derrida'' (ISBN 0-415-94269-1).
* [[Richard Rorty|Rorty, Richard]], "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty, ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
* [[Elisabeth Roudinesco|Roudinesco, Elisabeth]], ''Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida'', Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
*[[John Sallis|Sallis, John]] (ed.), ''Deconstruction and Philosophy'', with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, [[Robert Bernasconi]], [[David Wood (philosopher)|David Wood]], and Derrida.
*{{Cite book|author=Sallis, John|title=The Verge of Philosophy|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-226-73431-6|authorlink= John Sallis|postscript=<!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}
*[[Marco Salvioli|Salvioli, Marco]], ''Il Tempo e le Parole. Ricoeur e Derrida a "margine" della fenomenologia'', ESD, Bologna 2006.
*[[James K. A. Smith|Smith, James K. A.]], ''Jacques Derrida: Live Theory''.
*Sprinker, Michael, ed. ''Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx,'' London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
*[[Bernard Stiegler|Stiegler, Bernard]], "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), ''Jacques Derrida and the Humanities'' (ISBN 0-521-62565-3).
*[[David Wood (philosopher)|Wood, David]] (ed.), ''Derrida: A Critical Reader''.
*[[Marko Zlomislic (philosopher)|Zlomislic, Marko]] (author), ''Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics, Lexington Books, 2004''.


==External links==
==External links==
* {{Wiktionary-inline}}
*{{Commonscatinline}}
*{{Wikiquote-inline}}
* Video of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco Jacques Derrida attempting to define "Deconstruction"]
* [http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacques-derrida/biography/ Jacques Derrida] Faculty profile at [[European Graduate School]] Biography, bibliography, photos and video lectures
* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Dec "Deconstruction" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
* [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html "Deconstruction" in Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts]
* Lawlor, Leonard. [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/ Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
* Coulter, Gerry. [http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/derrida.htm Passings: Taking Derrida Seriously]. Volume 2, Number 1, January 2005
* [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/155306/deconstruction "Deconstruction" in Encyclopedia Britannica"]
* Rawlings, John. [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/ ''Jacques Derrida''] Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
* [http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/4397/1/Deconstructing_History_by_Alun_Munslow___Institute_of_Historical_Research.pdf "Deconstructing History" by Alun Munslow]
* Rabaté, Jean-Michel. [http://web.archive.org/web/20030503001022/http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/jacques_derrida.html ''Jacques Derrida''] Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory.
* [http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#H2 "Deconstruction" in "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy"]
* Yeghiayan, Eddie ''[http://web.archive.org/web/20080504145724/http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/jacques.html Books and contributions to books]'' (up to 2001), Bibliography and translations list
* [http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/rorty.html "Deconstructionist Theory"] by [[Richard Rorty]]
*[http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf3q2nb26c Guide to the Jacques Derrida Papers.] Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
* [http://www.germanlawjournal.com/index.php?pageID=13&vol=6&no=1 "German Law Journal special number about Derrida and Deconstruction" ]
*[http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0n39q6th Guide to the Saffa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures.] Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
* [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/bridge/CriticalTheory/critical2.htm "Critical Legal Studies Movement" and the use of Deconstruction" ]
*[http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8z60mrk Guide to the Jacques Derrida Listserv Collection.] Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
* [http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconstruction.php "Deconstruction: Some Assumptions"] by John Lye
*{{Worldcat id|lccn-n79-92610}}
* [http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/bibliography.html A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology] by José Ángel García Landa (Deconstruction found under: Authors & Schools - Critics & Schools - Poststructuralism - On Deconstruction)
* [http://www.alansondheim.org/old/DECON Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction] by [[Willy Maley]]
* [http://lacoue-labarthe.cjb.cc/ Archive of the international conference "Deconstructing Mimesis - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe"] about the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and his mimetic version of deconstruction, held at the [[University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne|Sorbonne]] in January 2006
* [http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html How To Deconstruct Almost Anything - My Postmodern Adventure] by Chip Morningstar; a cynical introduction to 'deconstruction' from the perspective of a [[software engineer]].
* [http://www.sens-public.org/article.php3?id_article=312 Jacques Derrida: The Perchance of a Coming of the Otherwoman. The Deconstruction of Phallogocentrism from Duel to Duo] by Carole Dely, English translation by Wilson Baldridge, at ''Sens Public''
* [http://www.elupton.com/index.php?id=11 Ellen Lupton on deconstruction in Graphic Design]
* [http://www.enfocarte.com/5.26/moda.html Deconstruction of fashion; La moda en la posmodernidad] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
* [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Deconstruction An alternative look at deconstruction, from a perspective of its use in popular culture]


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|SHORT DESCRIPTION=Algerian philosopher
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|DATE OF BIRTH=July 15, 1930
|PLACE OF BIRTH=El-Biar, Algeria
|DATE OF DEATH=October 8, 2004
|PLACE OF DEATH=Paris, France
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[[Category:Jacques Derrida| ]]
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Revision as of 16:22, 26 January 2014

Jacques Derrida
File:Derrida main.jpg
Born
Jackie Élie Derrida[1]

(1930-07-15)July 15, 1930
DiedOctober 9, 2004(2004-10-09) (aged 74)
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy
Notable ideas
Deconstruction · Différance · Phallogocentrism · Free Play · Archi-writing · Metaphysics of presence

Jacques Derrida (/ʒɑːk ˈdɛr[invalid input: 'ɨ']də/; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; born Jackie Élie Derrida;[1] July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.[2][3][4]

During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence upon the humanities,[5] particularly on anthropology, sociology, semiotics, jurisprudence, and literary theory. His work still has a major influence in the academe of Continental Europe, South America and all countries where continental philosophy is predominant. His theories became crucial in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. Jacques Derrida's work also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music,[6] art,[7] and art critics.[8] Derrida was said to "leave behind a legacy of himself as the 'originator' of deconstruction."[9]

Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes present in his work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements.[10] Derrida became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious difficulty of his work made him controversial.[10][11]

Life

Derrida was born at daybreak on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Toledo that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of French Algeria.[12] His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970)[13] and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991),[14][15][16] named him Jackie, "which they considered to be an American name," though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid.[17][18][19] He was also given the middle name Élie, named after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision when he was seven days old; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name."[20]

Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life that he was a replacement for his deceased brother.[17] His youth was spent in Algiers and El-Biar.

On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide an instrument of revolt against the family and society:[21]

His readings also included Camus and Sartre.[21] On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his master's degree in Philosophy (diplôme d'études supérieures) on Edmund Husserl. He then achieved the highly competitive agrégation exam. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–7 academic year reading Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.[22] In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.

Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term School of suspicion) and Jean Wahl.[23] His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the École Normale Supérieure, which he kept until 1984.[24][25] In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.[25] Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has been attributed to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[26]

With Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to assume international prominence. At the same colloquium, Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come.[27] A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books—Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

He completed his D. Litt. (doctorat d'État) in 1980, submitting his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project; the text of Derrida's defense was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.

Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida was full professor (directeur d'études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.[28]

In 1986, Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although the suit was dropped in 2007.[29]

He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and University of Silesia.

Derrida has often been criticized by academics, such as the analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine.[30] In 1992, a number of analytical philosophers from Cambridge University and external institutions, headed by Barry Smith editor of The Monist, tried to stop the granting of the degree,[31] but were outnumbered when it was put to a vote.[32] Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."[33][34]

Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected;[citation needed] he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology). He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.

Late in his life, Derrida participated in two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida [Derrida's Elsewhere] by Saafa Fathy (1999),[35] and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).[36]

In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.[37]

At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship,[38] whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Prof. Dr. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: "Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age."[38]

Philosophy

On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as a historian.[39][40] Derrida questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture.[41] By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it.[33] During the American 1980s culture wars, this would attract the anger of politically conservative and right-wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.[5][33][41][42]

Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction".[41] On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.[43][44]

Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine the binary oppositions, hierarchies, and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded. Derrida saw deconstruction as a challenge to unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition.[41] Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text, in a broad sense,[45][46] emerges from semiology advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism and he posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.[47]

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion,[45] which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967),[48] is the statement that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).[48] Critics of Derrida have quoted it as a slogan to characterize and stigmatize deconstruction.[49][50][51][52][53] Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (...) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."[49][54]

Early works

At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl.[55] In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."[56]

Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations;[page needed] this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.[2][3][57]

The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.

The Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate (1959)

In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of Structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the Phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of Structuralism to a "Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate."

Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience;" for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.[citation needed] For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.[citation needed]

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[58] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[59] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[60] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".[61]

Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.[62]

1967–1972

Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference.[63]

On several occasions Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would have not said a single word.[64][65] Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?"[63] In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same[66] "Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."[67] Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Lévinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure,[68] Hegel,[69] Foucault,[70] Bataille,[69] Descartes,[70] anthropologist Lévi-Strauss,[71][72] paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan,[73] psychoanalyst Freud,[74] and writers such as Jabès[75] and Artaud.[76]

This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric,[77] and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.[78] He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.[78][79] Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture",[78] arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings."[77] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.[citation needed]

In 1968, he published his influential essay "Plato's Pharmacy" in the French journal Tel Quel .[80][81] This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.

1973–1980

Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).

Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,[41] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.[77][82][need quotation to verify]

Of Spirit (1987)

On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.[83] With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, "What of this meantime?"[84] His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II).[85] He considers "four guiding threads" of Heideggerian philosophy that form "the knot of this Geflecht [braid]": "the question of the question," "the essence of technology," "the discourse of animality," and "epochality" or "the hidden teleology or the narrative order."[86]

Of Spirit is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.[87]

1990s: political and ethical themes

Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.

Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac,[88][89] and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.

Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida utilized Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.[90]

Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.

In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."[91]

The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)

Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.

2002

In the October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, "everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle."[92] Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.[93]

Politics

Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:

  • Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École Normale Superieure, he said "I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally "freed" speech, of restored "transparence," and so forth."[94] During May '68, he met frequently with Maurice Blanchot.[95]
  • He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.
  • In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the petition against age of consent laws.
  • In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean-Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.[96]
  • In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leading a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled", as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on January 1, 1982.[97]
  • He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear war in 1984.[98]
  • He was active in cultural activities against the Apartheid government of South Africa and on behalf of Nelson Mandela beginning in 1983.
  • He met with Palestinian intellectuals during a 1988 visit to Jerusalem. He was active in the collective "89 for equality", which campaigned for the right of foreigners to vote in local elections.
  • He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
  • Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin's Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.[citation needed]
  • In the 2002 French presidential election he refused to vote in the run-off between far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.[citation needed]
  • While supportive of the American government in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (see Rogues and his contribution to Philosophy in a Time of Terror with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas).

Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.

Influences on Derrida

Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist;[21] and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.[21] The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV.[99] In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: "I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks to find rest" (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).[100]

Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger,[64][65] Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Austin[39] and Stéphane Mallarmé.[citation needed]

His book, Adieu à Emanuel Levinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.[citation needed]

Derrida and his peers and contemporaries

Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Samuel Weber and Catherine Malabou.

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe

Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.

Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).

Paul de Man

Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.

Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.

Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.

Michel Foucault

Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.[24]

In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text."[101] According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.[102] Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as "facile, nihilistic objections," without giving further argumentation.[102]

Derrida's translators

Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of these are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.

Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.

Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.[103] Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002 and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I (covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964-1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).[104]

With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."[105]

Marshall McLuhan

Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a "medium,"[106] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West."[107]

He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.[108] In a 1982 interview, he said:

"I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too."[109]

And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said:

"As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and "communication of consciousnesses." We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism."[110]

Criticism

Obscurantism

In an interview with reason.com John R. Searle was asked, "You've debated Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Are they making bad arguments, or are they just being misread?", Searle responded "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure."[111] In a paper entitled Ghostwriting[112] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx.[113] On Derrida's scholarship and writing style Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood".[114] Commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx, Terry Eagleton wrote "The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody."[115]

Criticism from analytic philosophers

Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association at least on one occasion in 1988,[116] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas,[117] and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy." One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.[77][82]

In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.[118]

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for allegedly misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1998).

Two quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.

Dispute with John Searle

In 1972 Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context", an essay on J. L. Austin's speech act theory; following a critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote in the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long defense of his original argument.

The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language —referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure."[119] Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that is to say, disconnected from the tradition established by Frege and continued through the work of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Quine—and consequently naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be non-issues.[119]

Searle argues that the ideas upon which deconstruction is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. For example, Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token."[119] According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: (a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. "nothing exists outside of text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte); (b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. ″"il n'y a pas de hors-texte" means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts";[120] (c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—for example—that everything exists in some context is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim—nothing exists outside of text—had been established. Searle wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."[121]

Cambridge Honorary Doctorate

Derrida has often been the target of attacks by analytic philosophers; an attack of major significance was their 1992 attempt at stopping Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate.[31]

There were protesters from within Cambridge philosophy faculty,[citation needed] but mostly the letter signatories were from other institutions from the US and UK. Eighteen protesters from other institutions, including Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:

... where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.:[31]

In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a vote.[32] Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."[33][34]

Dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB

Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism.[page needed] For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism".[122] In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.[123] Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points....[124]

Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.[125]

African bias

Christopher Wise in his book Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by Robert J.C. Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990)[page needed] and extended in his Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria.[page needed] In contrast, Wise compares Derrida's thought to precolonial notions of the word that are rooted in ancient Egyptian and African society. Wise argues that Derridean concept of spirit/specter as occult pharmakon is indebted not only to the Hebraic notion of ruah but also the Egyptian heka, Soninke naxamala, Mande nyama, and many other comparable Egypto-African concepts of the word, some that are historically prior to the Hebraic ruah. Wise suggests that Derrida deliberately elides related African concepts of the word in order to accord Judaism a place of special prominence within the history of European philosophy. He argues instead that European philosophy must acknowledge its historical indebtedness to Middle Eastern and African thought, which is not limited to the influence of Judaism alone.

Hostile obituaries

Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,[10] The Economist[126] and The Independent.[127] The magazine The Nation responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars."[5][41]

Works by Derrida

Selected translations of works by Derrida

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b Peeters, Benoît (2012). Derrida: A Biography. Polity. pp. 12–13. Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home. [...] The boy's main forename was probably chosen because of Jackie Coogan ... When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.. See also Bennington, Geoffrey (1993). Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 325. 1930 Birth of Jackie Derrida, July 15, in El-Biar (near Algiers, in a holiday house).. Cite error: The named reference "Jackie" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  2. ^ a b Bensmaïa, Réda Poststructuralism, in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93
  3. ^ a b Poster (1988), pp. 5–6
  4. ^ Vincent B. Leitch Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 27.
  5. ^ a b c Jonathan Culler (2008) Why deconstruction still matters: A conversation with Jonathan Culler, interviewed by Paul Sawyer for The Cornell Chronicle, Jan. 24, 2008
  6. ^ "Deconstruction in Music - The Jacques Derrida", Gerd Zacher Encounter, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, (2002)
  7. ^ e.g. "Doris Salcedo", Phaidon (2004)|"Hans Haacke", Phaidon (2000)
  8. ^ e.g. "The return of the real", Hal Foster, October - MIT Press (1996) | "Kant after Duchamp", Thierry de Duve, October - MIT Press (1996)|"Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry - Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975", Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October - MIT Press (2000)|"Perpetual Inventory", Rosalind E. Krauss, October - MIT Press, 2010
  9. ^ Calcagno, Antonio (March 2009). "Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author". Human Studies. 32 (1): 33–51. doi:10.1007/s10746-009-9108-2.
  10. ^ a b c Kandell, Jonathan. "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74", October 10, 2004
  11. ^ "Jacques Derrida". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. November 22, 2006. Accessed August 11, 2010.
  12. ^ "I took part in the extraordinary transformation of the Algerian Jews; my great-grandparents were by language, custom, etc., still identified with Arabic culture. After the Cremieux Decree (1870), at the end of the 19th c., the following generation became bourgeois", Jacques Derrida The Last Interview, May 2003.
  13. ^ "Haim, Aaron, Prosper, Charles, Aimé Aimé, Mémé - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc... - GeneaNet". Gw4.geneanet.org. January 18, 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  14. ^   Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR (January 18, 2012). "Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc... - GeneaNet". Gw4.geneanet.org. Retrieved October 21, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ Bennington (1991), p. 325
  16. ^ "Safar surname: occupational name from Arabic saffar which means worker in copper or brass", The Safar surname"
  17. ^ a b Powell (2006), p. 12.
  18. ^ Obituary in The Guardian, accessed August 2, 2007.
  19. ^ Cixous (2001), p. vii; also see this interview with Derrida's long-term collaborator John Caputo.
  20. ^ Peeters, Benoît (2012). Derrida: A Biography. Polity. p. 13. When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister. See also Derrida, Jacques (1993). ""Circumfession"". Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 96. 'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written (12-23-76)' the name of the prophet Élie, Elijah in English ... so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou Derrida ...
  21. ^ a b c d Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, pp. 35, 38–9
  22. ^ Caputo (1997), p. 25.
  23. ^ Bennington (1991), p. 330
  24. ^ a b Powell (2006) pp. 34–5
  25. ^ a b Powell (2006), p. 58
  26. ^ Leslie Hill, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 55.
  27. ^ Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 331
  28. ^ "Obituary: Jacques Derrida", by Derek Attridge and Thomas Baldwin, The Guardian, October 11, 2004. Retrieved Jan 19, 2010.
  29. ^ UC Irvine drops suit over Derrida's personal papers
  30. ^ J.E. D'Ulisse Derrida (1930–2004), New Partisan December 24, 2004 Quote: "Academic conservatives attack Derrida for his position on objectivity ... W.V.O. Quine ... his status as a good Republican"
  31. ^ a b c Barry Smith et al. Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, The Times (London), Saturday, May 9, 1992
  32. ^ a b John Rawlings (1999) Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction at Stanford University
  33. ^ a b c d Derrida (1992) Cambridge Review, pp. 404, 408–13.
  34. ^ a b Derrida (1990) Once Again from the Top, p. 332
  35. ^ IMDb
  36. ^ IMDb
  37. ^ Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, accessed May 9, 2012.
  38. ^ a b "The University of Heidelberg Mourns the Death of Jacques Derrida"
  39. ^ a b Derrida (1988) Afterword, pp. 130–1
  40. ^ Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, p. 54:

    Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [...] Deconstruction calls for a highly "historian's" attitude (Of Grammatology, for example, is a history book through and through).

  41. ^ a b c d e f Ross Benjamin Hostile Obituary for Derrida, The Nation, November 24, 2004
  42. ^ Derrida (1988) Afterword, p. 147
  43. ^ Derrida (1976) Where a Teaching Body Begins, English translation 2002, p. 72
  44. ^ Derrida (1993). "Spectres of Marx" (in French): 92Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  45. ^ a b Royle, Nicholas (2004) Jacques Derrida, pp. 62–63
  46. ^ Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76

    I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.

  47. ^ Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916 [trans. 1959]). Course in General Linguistics. New York: New York Philosophical Library. pp. 121–22. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)

    In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.

  48. ^ a b Derrida (1967) Of Grammatology, Part II Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title The Exorbitant. Question of Method, pp. 158–59, 163
  49. ^ a b Derrida (1988) Afterword, p. 136
  50. ^ Reilly, Brian J. (2005) Jacques Derrida, in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.
  51. ^ Coward, Harold G. (1990) Derrida and Indian philosophy, pp. 83, 137
  52. ^ Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) On a defence of derrida, in The Critical review (1990) Issues 30–32, pp. 40–41
  53. ^ Sullivan, Patricia (2004) Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, in Washington Post, October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007.
  54. ^ Glendinning, Simon (2011). Jacques Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
  55. ^ The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. English translation: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (2003).
  56. ^ Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 5
  57. ^

    (...) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.

    — "Structure, Sign and Play" in Writing and Difference, p. 353.
  58. ^ Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), Genèse et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:

    All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: "What does the notion of genesis in general, on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structure in general, on whose basis Husserl operates and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between genesis and structure in general?" is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.

  59. ^ If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (also in Writing and Difference, and see below), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):

    Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.

    Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.

  60. ^ Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp. 77–8:

    If the alterity of the other is posed, that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed." Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded (différance): inscription, mark, text and not only thesis or theme-inscription of the thesis.

    On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. Bernard Stiegler, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.) Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" (p. 239). See also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  61. ^ It is opposed to the concept of original purity, which destabilises the thought of both "genesis" and "structure", cf. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:

    It is an opening that is structural, or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.

    And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why différance is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962).

  62. ^ Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, "Infrastructures and Systematicity," in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:

    One of the more persistent misunderstandings that has thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect, and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [...] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to "account," in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the successful development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.

  63. ^ a b Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp. 4–5 quote: "[Speech and Phenomena] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works. Of Grammatology refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture, Speech... would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology." Cite error: The named reference "67RonseP4" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  64. ^ a b Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8
  65. ^ a b On the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his "Letter to a Japanese Friend" (Derrida and différance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) that the word "déconstruction" was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms Destruktion and Abbau, via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term "demolition," as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy.
  66. ^ Derrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97–192.
  67. ^ Caputo (1997), p. 42
  68. ^ Linguistics and Grammatology in Of Grammatology, pp. 27–73
  69. ^ a b From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve in Writing and Difference
  70. ^ a b Cogito and the History of Madness in Writing and Difference
  71. ^ The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau in Of Grammatology, pp. 101–140
  72. ^ Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Writing and Difference
  73. ^ Of Grammatology, pp. 83-86.
  74. ^ Freud and the Scene of Writing in Writing and Difference
  75. ^ "Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book" and "Ellipsis" in Writing and Difference, pp. 64-78 and 295-300.
  76. ^ La Parole soufflée and The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference
  77. ^ a b c d Lamont '87, pp. 590, 602–606 (Lamont, Michele How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 93, No. 3 [Nov., 1987])
  78. ^ a b c Wayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27).
  79. ^ Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément [1975] La jeune née
  80. ^ Spurgin, Tim (1997) Reader's Guide to Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"
  81. ^ Graff (1993)
  82. ^ a b Sven Ove Hansson Philosophical Schools – Editorial From Theoria vol. 72, Part 1 (2006).
  83. ^ Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, pp.vii-1
  84. ^ Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, p.1
  85. ^ Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, p.7, 11, 117-118
  86. ^ Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, pp.8-12
  87. ^ Powell 2006, 167.
  88. ^ Jack Reynolds, Jonathan Roffe (2004) Understanding Derrida p. 49
  89. ^ Gift of Death, pp. 57–72
  90. ^ B. L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas,"Que dirait Eurydice?"/ "What would Eurydice Say?" (1991-93). Reprinted to coincide with Kabinet exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. This is a reprint of Le féminin est cette différence inouïe (Livre d'artiste, 1994, and it includes the text of Time is the Breath of the Spirit, MOMA, Oxford, 1993.) Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
  91. ^ The Other Heading, pp. 5–6
  92. ^ Derrida (2002) Q&A session at Film Forum
  93. ^ Derrida (2005) [1997]. "Les Intellectuels" (in French): 39–40Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  94. ^ Derrida (1991) "A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking", pp. 347–9.
  95. ^ Bennington (1991), p. 332
  96. ^ Powell (2006), p. 151
  97. ^ Jacques Derrida, "'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis," Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 70–1.
  98. ^ Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)". Diacritics, 1984
  99. ^ Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV, quote: «Familles, je vous hais! Foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.»
  100. ^ 1991 Interview with Francois Ewald Wahn muß übers Denken wachen published in: Werner Kolk (Translator). Literataz. 1992, p. 1-2. (German), as quoted in http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3891m6db#page-1
  101. ^ Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xxiv,573.
  102. ^ a b Carlo Ginzburg [1976], Il formaggio e i vermi, translated in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii. ISBN 978-0-8018-4387-7
  103. ^ "Derrida Seminar Translation Project". Derridaseminars.org. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  104. ^ "Derrida Seminar Translation Project". Derridaseminars.org. Retrieved January 1, 2014.
  105. ^ "Lovely Luton". Hydra.humanities.uci.edu. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  106. ^ Speech and Phenomena, Introduction
  107. ^ Of Grammatology, Part I.1
  108. ^ Poster (2010), pp. 3–4, 12–13
  109. ^ Derrida [1982] Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview, with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia). No.1/1983: p. 42
  110. ^ Derrida 1972 Signature Event Context
  111. ^ Searle, John R. (2000). "Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle". Reason.com. Interviewed by Steven R. Postrel and Edward Feser. Reason Foundation. Archived from the original on April 16, 2009. Retrieved August 21, 2013. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; December 16, 2009 suggested (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  112. ^ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1995). "Ghostwriting". Diacritics. 25 (2). The Johns Hopkins University Press: 64–84.
  113. ^ |Jacques Derrida|Marx & Sons|Sprinker, Michael, ed. (2008). "Chapter 10: Marx & Sons". Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx". chapter by Jacques Derrida. London: Verso. p. 223. ISBN 9781844672110.
  114. ^ Noam, Chomsky (1995). "Postmodernism?". ZCommunications. Retrieved August 21, 2013. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  115. ^ Sprinker, Michael, ed. (2008). "Chapter 5: Marxism without Marx". Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx". chapter by Terry Eagleton. London: Verso. pp. 83–7. ISBN 9781844672110.
  116. ^ Garver, Newton (1991). "TOPOI". Topoi. 10 (2): 187–98. doi:10.1007/BF00141339Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: |contribution= ignored (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  117. ^ "Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida," The New Republic 197:14 (October 5, 1987).
  118. ^ Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: "From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida"
  119. ^ a b c Searle, John R. (1994). "Literary Theory and Its Discontents". Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 25 (3). The Johns Hopkins University Press: 637–67.
  120. ^ Derrida, Jacques (1988). "Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion". Limited Inc (1st ed.). Illinois: Northwestern University Press. p. 136. ISBN 0810107880. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ("there is nothing outside the text" [it n y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.
  121. ^ Searle, John R. (October 27, 1983). "The Word Turned Upside Down". The New York Review of Books. NYREV, Inc. Archived from the original on October 13, 2012. Retrieved August 21, 2013.
  122. ^ Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin(Ed.) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p xiii. ISBN 0-262-73101-0
  123. ^ [1], [2]
  124. ^ Derrida, "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," published in the book Points... (1995; see the footnote about ISBN 0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French Version Points de suspension: entretiens (ISBN 0-8047-2488-1) there).
  125. ^ Points, p. 434
  126. ^ The Economist. Obituary: Jacques Derrida, French intellectual, Oct 21, 2004
  127. ^ The Independent
  128. ^ Jacques Derrida. "Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida". Marxists.org. Retrieved October 21, 2012.

References (works cited)

Further reading – works on Derrida

Introductory works

  • Adleman, Dan (2010) "Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory" (PDF)
  • Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics.
  • Culler, Jonathan (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
  • Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy.
  • Deutscher, Penelope (2006) How to Read Derrida (ISBN 978-0-393-32879-0).
  • Goldschmit, Marc (2003) Jacques Derrida, une introduction" Paris, Agora Pocket, ISBN 2-266-11574-X.
  • Hill, Leslie (2007) The Cambridge introduction to Jacques Derrida
  • Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language.
  • Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
  • Lentricchia, Frank (1980) After the New Criticism.
  • Moati Raoul (2009), Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire
  • Norris, Christopher (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
  • Thomas, Michael (2006) The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation.
  • Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.

Other works

  • Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205-19.
  • Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (ISBN 0-415-10967-1).
  • Bennington, Geoffrey, Legislations (ISBN 0-86091-668-5).
  • Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (ISBN 0-415-22427-6).
  • Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.
  • Coward, H.G. (ed) Derrida and Negative theology, SUNY 1992. ISBN 0-7914-0964-3
  • de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102-41.
  • El-Bizri, Nader, 'Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), 473-490.
  • Fabbri, Lorenzo. "Chronotopologies of the Exception. Agamben and Derrida before the Camps", "Diacritics," Volume 39, Number 3 (2009): 77-95.
  • Foucault, Michel, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550-74.
  • Gasché, Rodolphe, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
  • Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror.
  • Goldschmit, Marc, Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006. ISBN 2-84938-058-X
  • Habermas, Jürgen, "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
  • Hägglund, Martin, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
  • Hamacher, Werner, Lingua amissa, Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila editores, 2012.
  • Kierans, Kenneth (1997). "Beyond Deconstruction" (PDF). Animus. 2. ISSN 1209-0689. Retrieved August 17, 2011.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  • Kopić, Mario, Izazovi post-metafizike, Sremski Karlovci - Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica, 2007. (ISBN 978-86-7543-120-6)
  • Kopić, Mario, Nezacjeljiva rana svijeta, Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2007. (ISBN 978-953-249-035-0)
  • Mackey, Louis, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology," in Anglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3, July, 1983. 255–272.
  • Mackey, Louis, "A Nicer Knowledge of Belief" in Loius Mackey, An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature, Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219–240 (ISBN 978-0761822677)
  • Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN 0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
  • Magliola, Robert, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
  • Marder, Michael, The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN 0-8020-9892-4)
  • Miller, J. Hillis, For Derrida, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
  • Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida.
  • Norris, Christopher, Derrida (ISBN 0-674-19823-9).
  • Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
  • Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida (ISBN 0-415-94269-1).
  • Rorty, Richard, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
  • Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
  • Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida.
  • Sallis, John (2009). The Verge of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-73431-6Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  • Salvioli, Marco, Il Tempo e le Parole. Ricoeur e Derrida a "margine" della fenomenologia, ESD, Bologna 2006.
  • Smith, James K. A., Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.
  • Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
  • Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN 0-521-62565-3).
  • Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader.
  • Zlomislic, Marko (author), Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics, Lexington Books, 2004.

External links

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