Jacques Derrida

1930-2004 · French · Continental Philosophy, Deconstruction, Philosophy of Language, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Political Philosophy

Deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place.

Expelled from his lycée in Algiers at twelve under Vichy's racial quotas, Derrida grew up knowing what it means to be excluded from a tradition that claims universality. That experience — Algerian, Sephardic Jewish, French-educated but never quite French — shaped a career devoted to what Western thought suppresses to define itself. Immersed in Husserl and Heidegger at the École Normale Supérieure, he published three books in 1967 that shook continental philosophy: "Of Grammatology," "Writing and Difference," "Speech and Phenomena."

Topics Jacques Derrida addresses

• différance
• deconstruction
• the trace
• the supplement
• iterability
• the pharmakon
• the metaphysics of presence
• logocentrism
• phonocentrism
• phallogocentrism
• the parergon
• espacement
• the gram
• writing and the arche-writing
• there is no outside-text
• hauntology
• the specter
• the messianic without messianism
• the gift and the impossible
• hospitality
• the aporia
• undecidability
• the quasi-transcendental
• the infrastructural chain

Converse with Jacques Derrida on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Jacques Derrida's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.