Jacques Derrida: Biography Of This French Philosopher

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher, recognized as one of the most influential of the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions that have been part of contemporary Western philosophy. He is, among other things, the founder of “deconstruction”, a way of critically analyzing the literary organization of texts and philosophy, as well as the political organization of institutions.

In this article we will see developed the biography of Jacques Derrida one of the most influential philosophers for literary and political theory and criticism of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jacques Derrida: biography of an influential contemporary philosopher

Jacques Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El Biar, Algeria , which at that time was a French colony. He was the son of Jewish-Spanish parents and was educated in the French tradition from a very early age.

In 1949, after the Second World War, he tried to enter the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, France. But it was not until 1952 when he managed to gain access, after repeating the admission exam for the second time. He was formed in an intellectual climate where several of the most representative philosophers of the 20th century were on the rise For example, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Althusser, Lacan, Ricoeur, Levi-Strauss or Levinas.

Derrida worked very closely with some of them, and also remained critical of several of their proposals. For example, he did important readings on the works of Levinas and Michel Foucault, whom he criticized for his interpretation of Descartes.

Likewise, he developed his work in which he was the century of development and rise of phenomenology Derrida was trained very close to his greatest exponent, Edmund Husserl. Later he specialized in the philosophy of Hegel together with Jean Hyppolite and Maurice de Gandillac, with whom he completed a doctoral thesis in 1953 on “The ideality of the literary object.”

Academic activity

In the following years his work became very extensive and complex, while he served as a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne University from 1960 to 1964, a time in which He began writing and publishing numerous articles and books that address quite diverse topics.

Later he also served as a professor at his alma mater, the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, all of them in Paris. He was also a visiting professor at different universities around the world, including Yale University and the University of California.

Deconstruction and meaning

Jacques Derrida is recognized, among other things, for having developed “deconstruction”, which refers to a fairly complex act whose interpretation and applications can be very different, and which has nevertheless marked the philosophical production of much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In very broad terms, Derrida uses deconstruction to critically examine the conceptual paradigms in which Western society has been based from the beginnings of Greek philosophy to the present day.

These paradigms are strongly loaded with a particular element: dichotomies (hierarchical oppositions between two concepts), which have generated binary thoughts and understandings about the phenomena of the world and about human beings. As well as they have also generated forms of identification and construction of specific subjectivities.

Being hierarchical oppositions, they have the consequence that we understand one of the two phenomena of the dichotomy as the primary, or fundamental, phenomenon, and the second as a derivative. For example, what happens in the classic distinction between the mind and the body; nature and culture; the literal and the metaphorical, among many others.

Through deconstruction, Derrida made visible and operational the way in which which philosophy, science, art or politics have emerged as a result of these oppositions which among other things has had effects in subjective terms, and in experience and social organization.

And he made it visible and operational mainly through examine the contradictions and tensions between these hierarchies (whether they are presented explicitly or implicitly), as well as analyzing their consequences in terms of meaning construction.

Precisely, what is derived from the latter is the suggestion that the paradigms in which our societies have settled are not natural, immovable, nor necessary in and of themselves; but rather they are a product or a construction.

Literary criticism and text analysis

While Derrida develops this from literary criticism, deconstruction applies initially to the analysis of the text An example is the opposition between speech and writing, where speech is understood as the primordial and most authentic element. Derrida shows that the same composition that is traditionally associated with writing is present in discourse, as is the possibility of equivocation.

By revealing the constracciditions in the compositional structure, it is shown the impossibility of creating terms that are primordial and therefore hierarchical, with which there may be the possibility of restructuring.

For Derrida, the meaning of a word is a function that takes place in the contrast that is shown when relating it to another. From this it follows that the meaning is never fully, nor “truly,” revealed to us, as if the word itself were the object it names in itself. Rather, it is about meanings that we share after a long and infinite chain of meanings contrasted with each other.