86 Facts About Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher.

Jacques Derrida developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology.

Jacques Derrida is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and "never used this word [postmodernity]".

Jacques Derrida had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, music, architecture, and political theory.

In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Jacques Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale.

Jacques Derrida influenced architecture, music, art, and art criticism.

Particularly in his later writings, Jacques Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work.

Jacques Derrida became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial.

Jacques Derrida was often named - but never awarded - for a Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jacques Derrida's family was Sephardic Jewish, and became French in 1870 when the Cremieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria.

Jacques Derrida was given the middle name Elie after his paternal uncle Eugene Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his "hidden name".

Jacques Derrida's elder brother Paul Moise died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother.

Jacques Derrida secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycee formed by displaced teachers and students, and took part in numerous football competitions.

On his first day at ENS, Jacques Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends.

Jacques Derrida then passed the highly competitive agregation exam in 1956.

In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984.

In 1965 Jacques Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.

The text of Jacques Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS entitled "The Ideality of the Literary Object" ; his 1980 dissertation was published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations".

In 1983 Jacques Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance.

Jacques Derrida appears in the film as himself and contributed to the script.

Jacques Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions.

Jacques Derrida became full professor at the in Paris from 1984.

On 8 May 1985, Jacques Derrida was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Class IV - Humanities, Section 3 -Criticism and Philology.

In 1986 Jacques Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004.

Jacques Derrida 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.

Jacques Derrida was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Silesia, the University of Coimbra, the University of Athens, and many others around the world.

Jacques Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements.

Jacques Derrida died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of 9 October 2004.

At the time of his death, Jacques Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship, whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death.

Jacques Derrida questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and more broadly Western culture.

Jacques Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction".

On some occasions, Jacques Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.

Jacques Derrida sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a "metaphysics of presence" to which philosophy has bound itself.

Critics of Jacques Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "" and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Jacques Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.

Many elements of Jacques Derrida's thought were already present in this work.

Jacques 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.

Jacques Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement.

Jacques Derrida praised the accomplishments of structuralism but maintained reservations about its internal limitations; this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.

The effect of Jacques 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.

Jacques Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields.

Jacques Derrida 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 or intended sense.

Jacques 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 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Difference.

On several occasions, Jacques Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.

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 Jacques Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.

Jacques Derrida in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.

Jacques Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.

Jacques Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities.

On 14 March 1987, Jacques Derrida presented at the CIPH conference entitled "Heidegger: Open Questions," a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question.

Some have argued that Jacques Derrida's work took a political and ethical "turn" in the 1990s.

Some, including Jacques Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.

Jacques Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional.

Jacques Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy.

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

At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Jacques Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of "the autobiographical animal" entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am.

In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Jacques Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Jacques Derrida's texts.

Jacques Derrida engaged with a variety of political issues, movements, and debates throughout his career.

Jacques Derrida registered his objections to the Vietnam War in a lecture he gave in the United States.

Jacques Derrida signed a petition against age of consent laws in 1977, and in 1981 he founded the French Jan Hus association to support dissident Czech intellectuals.

In 1981, Jacques Derrida was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government for leading a conference without authorization and charged with drug trafficking, although he claimed the drugs were planted on him.

Jacques Derrida was released with the help of the Mitterrand government and Michel Foucault.

Jacques Derrida was an advocate for nuclear disarmament, protested against apartheid in South Africa, and met with Palestinian intellectuals during a visit to Jerusalem in 1988.

Jacques Derrida opposed capital punishment and was involved in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Jacques Derrida opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself within and beyond philosophy.

Jacques Derrida focused on understanding the political implications of notions such as responsibility, reason of state, decision, sovereignty, and democracy.

Jacques Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy.

Shortly after de Man's death, Jacques Derrida wrote the 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 Jacques 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.

Critics of Jacques Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing.

Many of Jacques Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right.

Jacques Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.

Barbara Johnson's translation of Jacques Derrida's Dissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981.

Jacques Derrida expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.

Jacques Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century.

Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking Jacques Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's khora, Greek for space, receptacle or site.

Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Jacques Derrida's work is "not philosophy".

One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Jacques Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.

In garbling his message Jacques Derrida is attempting to escape the naive, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.

Jacques Derrida 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.

In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Jacques Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate.

Jacques 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".

In 1991, when Wolin published a Jacques Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Jacques Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive".

Jacques Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press ", which was published in the book Points.

Critical obituaries of Jacques Derrida were published in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Independent.

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 Jacques Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction.

One of the more persistent misunderstandings that have thus far forestalled a productive debate with Jacques Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible.

Jacques 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.