Jacques Derrida — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Derrida was born in 1930 in El Biar, near Algiers, into a Sephardic Jewish family, and was expelled from his lycée at twelve under the Vichy quota on Jewish pupils — an early experience of being inside and outside a culture at once that he returned to late in life. He went to France at nineteen, studied at the École normale supérieure, and taught there and at the Sorbonne before helping found the Collège international de philosophie. His 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins introduced his work to the United States, where it had far greater institutional impact on literary studies than in French philosophy departments; the Yale critics — Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman — built a school around it. Cambridge's award of an honorary degree in 1992 was publicly opposed by analytic philosophers. His later work turned to ethics, law, hospitality, and religion. He died in Paris in 2004.

Of Grammatology

1967 (De la grammatologie)

The argument

The book argues that Western philosophy has consistently privileged speech over writing, treating writing as a derivative and dangerous substitute for the living presence of the voice. Derrida calls this preference logocentrism, and reads it as one instance of a wider metaphysics of presence, in which meaning is assumed to be guaranteed by something immediately present — the speaker's intention, the thing itself, the origin. Through close readings of Saussure, Rousseau, and Lévi-Strauss he shows that each text, in the act of subordinating writing, is forced to describe speech in terms borrowed from writing, so that the hierarchy collapses from within. He proposes that all signification works by the properties conventionally assigned to writing: difference, deferral, absence of the referent, iterability. Hence his formulation that there is no outside-text.

Reception and critique

Deconstruction is not a method of showing that texts mean nothing, and the most common misreading treats it as licence for arbitrary interpretation. Derrida's procedure is closer to the opposite: an extremely patient reading that locates the point at which a text's own logic contradicts the hierarchy it asserts, and it depends on the text saying something determinate enough to be undone. His coinage différance, which differs from différence only in writing and not in speech, is the argument performed rather than stated. The literary-critical afterlife in America was more free-wheeling than Derrida's own practice, which is part of why the label attracted the hostility it did; his exchange with John Searle over Austin's speech act theory, and Habermas's criticisms, mark the main lines of philosophical objection.

Key Concepts

Deconstruction

A reading practice that exposes how a text's argument depends on hierarchical oppositions its own logic cannot sustain.

Logocentrism

The Western privileging of speech, presence, and the voice as the guarantee of meaning, with writing treated as a secondary supplement.

Différance

Derrida's coinage combining difference and deferral: meaning arises from differences between signs and is endlessly postponed, never fully present.

Trace

Every sign carries the marks of what it is not, so presence is always contaminated by absence rather than being self-sufficient.

Binary oppositions

Speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, man/woman — pairs in which one term is privileged; deconstruction reverses and then displaces them.

Il n'y a pas de hors-texte

Usually rendered as there is no outside-text: not a denial of reality but a claim that nothing signifies outside a system of differences.

Why Derrida Matters

Derrida transformed literary studies in the English-speaking world more than any other continental philosopher, giving criticism a rigorous account of why textual meaning cannot be finally stabilised, and supplying the Yale School with its method. Deconstruction became the technique through which feminist, postcolonial, and queer criticism dismantled the oppositions they inherited — Spivak's translation of Of Grammatology is itself a founding moment in postcolonial theory. His terms, and the arguments against them, are core content in any theory paper.

Key Facts

Expelled under Vichy

He was thrown out of his Algiers lycée at twelve under quotas limiting Jewish pupils.

The 1966 Johns Hopkins lecture

Structure, Sign and Play introduced his work in America and effectively launched deconstruction in literary studies.

The Yale School

De Man, Hillis Miller, and Hartman turned deconstruction into a critical movement, more freely than Derrida himself practised it.

Opposed at Cambridge

Analytic philosophers publicly objected to his 1992 honorary degree, which was awarded after a formal vote.

All Major Works

Of Grammatology1967
Writing and Difference1967
Speech and Phenomena1967
Margins of Philosophy1972
Spectres of Marx1993
The Gift of Death1995