Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

Quotes
“What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.” Limited Inc (1977)

“Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.” Structure, Sign and Play (1966)

Biography and History
Jacques Derrida was born to an Algerian Jewish family in Algeria in 1930. At the age of 22, he moved to France to pursue studies at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris. Derrida was interested in writing, and in particular on the writing of philosophy itself, and in the history of Western philosophy as a whole. In the early 1960s he began to teach at Université Sorbonne. He spent most of his life teaching at the École Normale Supérieur, but frequently held appointments in universities in the United States. He became something of a public intellectual, and was known for extremely long, labyrinthian lectures in French. He died in 2004.

Work
It was in the early 1960s that Jacques Derrida began writing the texts that would become the basis for Of Grammatology, perhaps his most influential work, published in 1967. In it, he argues that logos or speech as an action bequeathing authenticity has had a privileged position over writing in Western philosophy from its Greek origins. Deconstruction, according to Derrida is a method of identifying dichotomies and other logo-centric patterns, to reveal that there is always a play happening in between any two opposed terms. This is similar to the argument made in “Structure, Sign, and Play”, a lecture given at John Hopkins University in 1966, which presented a serious challenge to the intellectual tradition of structuralism. Deconstruction has mainly been used to critically analyze literary texts, while the word has found wider usage as a term to describe in-depth, critical interpretation in general.

Influences
Derrida was influenced by Husserl, Nietzsche, Freud, and de Saussure amongst many others. His interest and teaching remained focused on philosophy and written language, but he was also inspired by Levi-Strauss' comments on his own structuralist ethnographic analysis (as is evident in “Structure, Sign, and Play”). As much of Derrida’s work was dedicated to moving away from most of Western philosophy’s biases, it is hard to associate him with any particular school. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that, true to his method of deconstruction, and like many of his contemporaries, he was notorious for rejecting simplistic categorization. However, he is recognized as an important figure in what has been called “post-modernism”, and had initially set out to pluralize or widen structuralism (scholars of this orientation are sometimes labelled as “post-structuralists”). As such, his associations remain nebulous, but he is frequently associated with postmodernist and French (post-)structuralist thought.

Analysis
Derrida developed deconstruction in response to what he perceived as a focus in Western philosophy on finding a central meaning-giving idea to existence (such as authenticity, rationality, God, presence, etc.). French structuralism had also focused on the study of existence in terms of binaries, which Derrida found to be rigid formulations of the actual interplay that goes into the creation of meaning. The fact that Derrida was coming from Algeria to criticize French scholars is not insignificant either. Deconstruction also developed, according to Derrida, as a way to make claims for justice against powerful institutions claiming some kind of suprerior authenticity or rationality (e.g. the state, science).

Critique
Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy and structuralism have been well-received in general. Indeed, a sign of Derrida’s popularity has been the widespread use of the word “deconstruction” in anything that involves critical interpretation. However, philosophers like Searle and Foucault have criticized Derrida’s later work for being too obscure to understand, and being so removed from reality so as to be saying nothing clear at all. This kind of criticism has also been levelled at Lyotard and Barthes who also tend to sometimes substitute conventional argument for acommunicative word-games. Post-structuralism and post-modernism have been criticized, notably by more traditional Marxists, for ignoring the material reality of power relations in favour of concerns about nuance and subjectivity. The most vociferous critics say that post-modernism ignores reality altogether by claiming everything is subjective. The legacy of Derrida’s thinking and of post-modernism and post-structuralism more broadly remains contested.