Jacques Derrida

Published on Monday 11 October 2004 02:17

Philosopher and founder of deconstructionism

Born: 15 July, I930, in El-Biar, Algeria.

Died: 8 October, 2004, in Paris, aged 74.

JACQUES Derrida, the influential French thinker and writer who inspired admiration, vilification and utter bewilderment as the founder of the intellectual movement known as deconstruction, has died. He was 74.

"With him, France has given the world one of its greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of intellectual life of our time," Jacques Chirac, the French president, said on Saturday. "Through his work, he sought to find the free movement which lies at the root of all thinking."

Derrida, who divided his time between Paris and the United States, was perhaps the most controversial and daring philosopher of the late 20th century.

He rocked the foundations of modern thinking in a 1966 speech that introduced deconstruction as a mode of analysis that sought to turn western philosophy on its head.

Deconstruction gained a following in universities across the western world. A notoriously difficult theory, it left an imprint on a number of fields, particularly literature, where scholars seized on deconstruction as the basis for radical reinterpretations of classic works of literature and philosophy. Gradually, disciplines as disparate as business, architecture, law and religion showed the influence of Derrida’s ideas.

Although deconstruction’s influence has waned, it even penetrated popular culture, where the avant-garde in seemingly everything from couture to cuisine has been described, rightly or wrongly, as "deconstructed".

"Of all the philosophers of our time," eminent Stanford University philosopher Richard Rorty once said, Derrida "has been the most effective at doing what Socrates hoped philosophers would do: breaking the crust of convention, questioning assumptions never before doubted, raising issues never before discussed".

His detractors were just as vociferous. Some labelled him a nihilist for his subversion of traditional principles, while others charged him with deliberate inscrutability.

John Searle, a Mills professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley and one of Derrida’s most eloquent critics, once said that what he found most deplorable about Derrida and deconstruction was "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".

The father of deconstruction was a dapper man with a dark Mediterranean complexion, bushy brows and a fluffy crown of white hair. The author of more than 50 books, he tended to convey his ideas in the most confounding language possible, playing with words and writing sentences that ran two or three pages long. Critics declared some of his essays and books unreadable. But what some found unfathomable others said embodied the elusiveness of meaning, a central tenet of Derridean thinking.

What perturbed many of his critics was deconstruction’s focus on picking apart a text, finding the ambiguities and contradictions, and "deconstructing" them until the surface meaning collapsed.

Derrida was born in Algiers in 1930, the fifth generation of his family of assimilated Sephardic Jews to be raised in Algeria. Although his life was comfortably middle class, his early years were fraught with tragedy and crisis. Two brothers died in childhood, causing his mother to panic whenever Derrida showed signs of illness.

In 1940, when he was ten, the Nazi collaborationists who ruled French Algeria imposed quotas on Jewish school enrolment, and Derrida, the top student at his academy, was expelled. A teacher said French culture was "not made for little Jews". He and his family were stripped of their citizenship.

Derrida spent an unhappy interlude in an unofficial Jewish lycee in Algiers until the end of the war, when normality returned to the schools. Often truant during the war, he continued to pay little attention to his studies, dreaming instead of becoming a professional soccer player.

Although his grades were poor, his intellectual ability was undeniable: He was sent to Paris to study for entrance to the Ecole Normale Superieure, France’s most prestigious college. He was admitted in 1952 and plunged into his formal study of philosophy.

He met his future wife, Marguerite Aucouturier, at the Ecole Normale. A psychoanalyst, she and Derrida were married in 1957.

After graduating in 1956, Derrida spent a year at Harvard University on a graduate scholarship, then returned to Algeria to serve in the French army as a teacher. He moved back to France in 1960 to teach philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne.

In 1962, Derrida published his first important work: a French translation of German philosopher Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, for which he wrote a book-length introduction.

By 1965, Derrida was teaching the history of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure and was associated with Tel Quel, a leftist magazine that published work by such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

The following year saw the publication of three seminal volumes: Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology.

Of Grammatology, his most famous work, focuses on the submerged dualisms and hierarchies that Derrida considered the foundation of western thought. He said that embedded in any text were oppositional pairs such as good/evil, mind/body, male/female, truth/fiction. He further said that the first term in any set of such "binary opposites" is valued or privileged over the second. It is these oppositions, Derrida argued, that must be deconstructed.

To illustrate how the greatest philosophers contradict themselves, he often cited Plato’s declaration that oral discourse "is written in the soul of the listener". If speech, as the father of Western thought asserted, was superior to writing, how could it then be "written" in the soul?

Like a Freudian slip, Plato’s choice of words undercut his own argument, Derrida insisted, demonstrating that speech is not more authentic or closer to truth than writing.

In fact, Derrida believed that pairs such as speech/writing were not absolute opposites but linked, as accomplices, so that one had no meaning without the other.

Derrida is survived by his wife, Marguerite, along with their sons, Pierre and Jean.