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His work retains major academic influence throughout continental Europe , South America and all other countries where " continental philosophy " has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology , epistemology especially concerning social sciences , ethics , aesthetics , hermeneutics , and the philosophy of language.
He also influenced architecture in the form of deconstructivism , music, [16] art, [17] and art criticism. Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena to be his most important work. These writings influenced various activists and political movements.
Derrida was the third of five children. In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau , Nietzsche , and Gide an instrument of revolt against family and society. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University , and he spent the —57 academic year reading James Joyce 's Ulysses at the Widener Library.
During the Algerian War of Independence of —, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from to With " Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences ", his contribution to a colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University , his work began to gain 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. Research on the Interpretation of Writing". 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. He was elected as its first president. In Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel. In Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine , where he taught until shortly before his death in His papers were filed in the university archives.
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 it dropped the suit in Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine , Marcus , and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that "Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour," and "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".
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in , which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, [48] whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: Derrida referred to himself as a historian.
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself. This "logocentrism," Derrida argues, creates "marked" or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from our conception of speech's relation to writing to our understanding of racial difference.
Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such "metaphysics. Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, [55] which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology , [58] is the statement that "there is no out-of-context" il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.
Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology. 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 , Derrida said: 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 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; [67] this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in , 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.
In the early s, 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 takes 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.
In that context, in , 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? This original 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.
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. Derrida's interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger , and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.
An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: This collection of three books published in 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, [88] and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. Starting in , Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after , where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities.
In the s, during the American culture wars , conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, [51] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.
Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist spirit through Heidegger's work, noting that, in , "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.
Derrida asks, "What of this meantime? How to Concede, with Reasons? Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law , as well as Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this.
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. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory , anthropology , sociology , historiography , law, psychoanalysis , theology , feminism , gay and lesbian studies and political theory.
Derrida used Bracha L. Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot , Paul Celan , and others. In 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.
Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late "animal turn" in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is, in fact, present in his earliest writings. Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in , 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. Paul de Man's War".
In October , 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.
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 s on.
By , theorizing "democracy to come," and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns. 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 a method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early s. Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: 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 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: 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 s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida and, after him, Maurice Blanchot expressed shock. In an appendix added to the 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 [ A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text.
Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often 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 to Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: 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 that: I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan , and since his early writings Of Grammatology , Speech and Phenomena , he speaks of language as a "medium," [] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West.
He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.
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 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.
And this is writing too. 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. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in , [] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty , Alexander Nehamas , [] 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 s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , one section of which is an experiment in fiction purposefully uses words that cannot be defined e.
Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote in , "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else.
For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning — it always eludes us and therefore anything goes. 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". Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: Three quarrels or disputes in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: In the early s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory.
The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by dedicating any attention to it.
Consequently, some critics [] have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others [] have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".
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